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OF THE 



HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH 
LANGUAGE 



THE USE OF THE JUNIOR CLASSES IN COLLEGES AND 
THE HIGHER CLASSES IN SCHOOLS. 



GEORGE L. CRAIK, 

I*ROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN 
QUEEN'S COLLEGE, BELFAST. 



Spirit (BMftra, toisBii atti 3nqrnrarir. 



LONDON- 
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 



1859. 



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I.CTQ 

Western Ont. Univ. Libr ary 
APR 3 1940 



JOHN CHILDS AND SOX, PRINTERS. 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



These Outlines are an abstract from a portion 
of the Course of Lectures delivered in the Class of 
the English Language in Queen's College, Belfast, 
which is attended by undergraduates of the first 
year; but the work has been drawn up with the 
design of presenting a connected though succinct 
view of the essentials of its subject, and so as to be 
adapted for the general reader as well as for being 
used as a Text-book in any place of education in 
which English Philology is one of the departments 
of study. 

To the series of propositions printed in a larger 
type, which embody the leading facts constituting 
the History of the Language, and which perhaps 
might be advantageously committed to memory by 
young persons, have been subjoined the more im- 
portant of those minor and subsidiary particulars 
brought forward in the Lectures of which I had 
been accustomed to direct that notes should be taken. 



IV ADVERTISEMENT. 

In this way the student or reader is put in posses- 
sion of all the information necessary for the com- 
plete understanding of the general statements, and 
for following the survey of the subject so far as they 
carry it. 

Compendious, too, and elementary as the book is, 
it is constructed in part with a view to its serving 
as an introduction both to English History and to so 
much of the great modern science of Ethnology as 
depends upon the descent and relationship of lan- 
guages. 

In this Third Edition the work has again been 
carefully revised throughout, and, without much in- 
terference with either the substance or the arrange- 
ment, the expression made clearer or more precise in 
many places. A principal alteration is, that the 
terms Saxon and Anglo-Saxon have been everywhere 
discarded, as not only unauthorised by the facts of 
the case but absurd and eminently misleading. If 
the people were Saxons, and the language Saxon, 
before the Norman Conquest, nothing in that catas- 
trophe can possibly have converted either the one or 
the other into English. But, in truth, they have 
been always English ; — which is, and can be, the only 
reason why they are English now. 



CONTENTS. 



Section I. .pack 

Internal and External Evidence .. .. ... .. 1 

Connexion of Languages . . 2 

Section II. (Bkitons.) 

1. Tacitus and Caesar on the Britons 3 

View of Clerk and Pinkerton 4 

TheBelgae 4 

2. Oldest Topographical Nomenclature of Britain . . . . 4 

Chalmers 4 

Garnett 5 

Edward Lhuyd : — Gwydhelians of Wales . . . . 5 

3. The present Welsh 6 

Section III. (Romans.) 

Caesar's Invasions 7 

Halley ; Airy 7 

Roman Conquest and Colonization of Britain . . . . 8 

Monumenta Historica Britannica 8 

Retirement of the Romans 8 

Saxon Chronicle ; Ethelwerd 8 

Latin Language in Britain 9 

Limes Saxonicus 10 

Barbarians in Roman Britain 11 



VI CONTENTS 

Section IV. (Angles and Saxons.) pagk 

Historia Ecclesiastica of Beda 12 

The Gothic Invaders 12 

The Vita (Jutes) 12 

The Angles and Saxons . . 12 

Arrival of Hengist and Horsa 13 

Gildas; Nennius 13 

Beda ; Camden ; D' Anville ; Hardy 14 

Usher; Stillingfleet ; Gihson 14 

Lappenberg ; Herbert ; Bruce ; Guest 14 

Settlements of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes . . . . 15 

Frisians 15 

Sir Francis Palgrave 15 

Mr Kemble's Saxo?is in England 16 

Angles and Saxons in how far distinct 16 

Jutes ; Dr Latham 17 

Continental Country of the Saxons 17 

Section V. (Danes.) 

The Northmen ; Danes ; Denmark 18 

Modern Danish Populations 18 

Danish Invasions of England 19 

Guthrun ; the Danelagh 20 

Danish Conquest of England 20 

Section VI. (Normans.) 

Acquisition of Normandy by Rollo , 21 

Normans of France 21 

Relationship of English and Danes 22 

Norman Conquest of England 22 

Romance or Neo-Latin Tongues 22 

Franks ; France ; French ; Francic or Frankish . . 23 

Langue d'Oc and Langue d'Oyl 23 

Trouveres and Troubadours 23 

Counts of Provence . . 23 

Plantagenets of Anjou 24 

Section VII. 

Indo-European Family of Languages 25 



CONTENTS. VU 

Section VIII. page 

Competition of Languages 27 

Intermixture of Languages 29 

Section IX. (Celtic.) 

Amount of Celtic in English 30 

Mr Garnett's account "". . . . 30 

The Latin Multa, or Mulcta 31 

Basket 32 

Bother ; Pother 32 

Mr W. F. Edwards 33 

Existing Celtic Languages and Dialects 33 

Section X. (Latin.) 

Latin of the First Period in English 34 

Latin in Welsh 34 

Latin of the Second Period 35 

Concrete and Abstract terms , . . 35 

Section XI. (Germanic and Scandinavian.) 

Gothic Branch of Languages 36 

Germanic Languages 37 

High and Low Germanic Languages 37 

Scandinavian Languages 37 

Germanic or Scandinavian Extraction of the Angles ? . . 38 

Anglian and Saxon Dialects of English 39 

England ; English 39 

Domain of the Angles in England 39 

Remains of the Anglian Dialect 40 

Mr Kemble's investigations . . 41 

Mr Garnett's 41 

Giraldus Cambrensis ; John of "Wallingford ; Higden . . 41 

Scandinavianism in present English 42 

Latham ; Guest 42 

Durham Ritual ; St Cuthbert's Book 43 

The Engle and Sexe ; Guest 44 

Section XII. (French.) 

Reign of Edward the Confessor 45 

Norman Conquest 45 



V1U CONTENTS. 

The Conqueror and the English Language 
Norman and Plantagenet Kings of England 

Norman Settlers in England 

Legal Proceedings ; Laws ; Charters 

French Language in England : — Holcot ; Higden 

Section XIII. 



PAGE 

46 
46 
46 
47 
48 



Concluding portion of Saxon Chronicle 49 

The term Anglo- Saxon 50 

Anglo-Saxon Grammar 51 

"Written and Spoken Languages 52 

Chinese 52 

Vulgar Latin ; Komaic ; Pracrit 53 

Disintegration of Anglo-Saxon 53 

General Decay of Inflectional System in Germanic and 

Scandinavian Languages 54 

Murray ; Price 54 

Mr Guest's View 56 

Comparison of case of Anglo-Saxon with that of Latin 

and Greek 59 

Bunsen 61 

Section XIV. (Period of Semi-Saxon, a.d. 1050—1250.) 

Layamon's Brut .. . . . . . . . . . . 63 

Mr Guest ; Sir Frederic Madden 63 

Locality of Layamon's Dialect 64 

Layamon's Grammar 65 

His Modifications of the regular Anglo-Saxon . . . . 65 

His Nunnation 66 

Two Texts of his work 66 

Marks of "Western Dialect in Layamon 66 

'Section XV. (Period of Early English ; a.d. 1250—1350.) 

The Ormulum 68 

Tyrwhitt; Guest 68 

Peculiar Spelling in the Ormulum 69 

Extract from the Ormulum 69 

The Ormulum most probably of the latter part of the 

13th Century 71 



CONTENTS. IX 

PAGE 

Importance of the Ormulum for the History of the 

Language 71 

Carta Henrici III. in Idiomate Anglico ; A.D. 1258 . . 72 

Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle . . 75 

Robert of Brunne's Chronicle . . . . .^ . . 76 

De Brunne's English 76 

Prologue of De Brunne's Chronicle 76 

Section XVI. 

Three Stages of the French Language in England . . 78 

Ingulf, Croylandensis Historia .. . . . . . . 79 

Laws and Charters of the Norman Kings . . . . 79 

Children taught Latin through French 79 

Books written in French 80 

French extensively understood ( 80 

French Wars of Edward III. 81 

Discontinuance of French in Grammar Schools . . 81 

Statute of 1362 81 

Continuance of French as the Language of Statutes and 

of the Law 82 

Section XVII. 

Lasting Impression made upon the English Language 

by the French 83 

Chaucer 84 

Commencement of the Intermixture of the two Lan- 
guages 85 

Effects of the assumption by the English Language of a 

partially French character 85 

Translations from the French 86 

Intrusion of French Vocables facilitated by the weak- 
ened condition of the English Language . . . . 86 

Latin in Anglo-Saxon 86 

Section XVIII. 

Local Origin of Standard English 87 

Statement by Higden 87 

Guest's View 87 

Kingdom of Mercia 87 



X CONTENTS. 

PAGB 

Northern and Southern Conjugations 88 

Oxford and Cambridge 88 

Northern and Southern Dialects 89 

Midland Dialect 90 

Leicestershire Dialect : — Guest ; Latham . . . . 90 

Section XIX. (Period of Middle English : — a.d. 1350— 
1550.) 

Distinction of Semi- Saxon and Early English .. . . 91 

Distinction of Early English and Middle English . . 91 

English of Chaucer and his Contemporaries . . . . 92 

Its two Tendencies 92 

1. Its looking away from the Anglo-Saxon . . . . 92 
The Final e of Early and Middle English .. .. 94 

Tyrwhitt's View 95 

Price's View .. 96 

Guest's View 97 

The Four Modes of indicating the Long Vowel Sound 99 

Diverse Sounds of the English Vowels 100 

Prevailing Misconceptions 101 

Long and Short Syllables in English and in Latin . . 102 

Accent the only Principle of English Prosody . . . . 103 

The Anglo-Saxon e of Inflection ; Guest . . . . 104 

Summary of the Facts regarding e Final . . . . 105 

Other Peculiarities of Middle English 106 

2. Its looking towards the French 107 

Its now obsolete "Words mostly Saxon 108 

The Fabrication of Words directly from the Latin . . 108 

Aureate Terms of the "Writers of the 15th Century . . 108 

The Latin that has fixed itself in the English . . . . 109 

Latin of the Third and Fourth Periods : Latham . . 109 
The fluctuating Accentuation at first of many Words 

borrowed from the French 110 

Fabrication of Scientific and Technical Terms from the 

Greek Ill 

Section XX. 

Scientific View of the History of the English Language 114 



CONTENTS. XI 



ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 

PAGE 



SIMPLE ENGLISH:— 

1. Saxon Period : — From the Voyage of Ohther in Alfred's 

Translation of Orosius, book i. :— before a.d. 900 . . 115 

2. From the latter portion of the Saxon Chronicle : — about 

a.d. 1100 116 

BROKEN ENGLISH :— 

3. Semi-Saxon Period : — Commencement of Layamon's 

" Brut :"— about a.d. 1200 118 

4. Layamon's Description of the arming of Prince Arthur 120 

COMPOUND ENGLISH :— 

5. Early English Period : — Dedication of the Ormulum : — 

■about a.d. 1250 ? 123 

6. Commencement of Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle : — 

about a.d. 1300 123 

7. From Robert de Brunne's Translation of Langtoft's Chron- 

icle :— about a.d. 1340 125 

8. Middle English Period:— From Minot's Battle of 

Halidon Hill :— about a.d. 1350 126 

9. Commencement of the Vision of Piers Ploughman : — about 

A.d. 1360 126 

10. From Mandevil's Travels .-—about a.d. 1370 .. .. 127 

11. From Wycliffe's Translation of the Bible :— about a.d. 1380 128 

12. From Trevisa's Translation of Higden's Polychronicon : — 

a.d. 1385 129 

13. Beginning of the Reeve's Tale from Chaucer : — about a.d. 

1390 131 

14. From the Parson's Tale, (in Prose), by Chaucer : — about 

a.d. 1390 132 

15. From Lydgate'sPoem entitled his Testament : — about a.d. 

1450 132 

16. Conclusion of Caxton's English Translation of Higden's 

Polychronicon: — a.d. 1482 134 

17. Letter from Sir Thomas More to his Wife :— a.d. 1528 . . 135 

18. From Tyndal's Translation of the Bible :— a.d. 1534 and 

1536 136 



XU CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

19. From Cranmer's Bible :— a.d. 1539 .. 138 

20. Sonnet by the Earl of Surrey :— about a.d. 1545 .. .. 139 

21. Modern English Period : — From the Geneva New Testa- 

ment : — a.d. 1557 140 

22. Commencement of Sackvilie's Induction in the " Mirror for 

Magistrates:" — a.d. 1559 141 

23. From Ascham's " Schoolmaster : " — about a.d. 1563 . . 142 

24. From Sydney's " Apologie for Poetrie : " — about a.d. 1580 143 

25. From the Rheims New Testament : — a.d. 1582 . . . . 144 

26. From Spenser's " Faerie Queene :" — about a.d. 1590 . . 145 

27. From Spenser's " View of the State of Ireland : " — about 

a.d. 1595 146 

28. From the Authorised Translation of the Bible :— a.d. 1611 148 



J 

OUTLINES, 

Ac. 



I. There are two kinds of Evidence by which the origin 
or composition of any product may be attested : — 
the Internal ; and the External, or Historical. 

The distinction is, that the Internal Evidence is fur- 
nished by the product itself; the External, by some- 
thing else. 

And any fact considered in reference to the causes or 
circumstances out of which it may have arisen, or by 
which it may have been brought about, is a product. 

External Evidence is usually the clearer and more pre- 
cise in its intimations, as well as the more obtrusive or 
the more readily come by ; it is in these respects like 
other superficial or outside things; but Internal Evi- 
dence, when its interpretation is free from doubt, is the 
more trustworthy and conclusive. It is the pure reason 
of the case, speaking to us directly, by which we cannot 
be deceived if we only rightly apprehend it. The mind, 
however, is not satisfied without a concurrence of the 
two kinds of evidence whenever the case seems to admit 
of it. 

It is very rarely, if ever, that Internal Evidence is ab- 



2 OUTLINES OP THE HISTOET OF 

solutely wanting; External Evidence frequently is. A 
familiar instance of evidence which is purely internal, and 
yet sufficient, is that with which Paley sets out in his 
work on Natural Theology, of a watch in motion found by a 
person who had never seen or heard of such a contrivance, 
but who at once and without any doubt infers it to be 
the work of an intelligent and designing mind. His infer- 
ence to that extent could hardly have been strengthened 
by the addition of any amount of external evidence. 

In other questions, however, such as that of who wrote 
a book of unknown or disputed authorship, or who 
painted a particular picture, the internal evidence, which 
we always have, and without which in such a case no ac- 
cumulation of external evidence would be enough to pro- 
duce perfect conviction, at least to a mind of any critical 
sagacity, is usually endowed with much greater power of 
securing our acquiescence and reliance when it has the 
support of external evidence. 

It is the same with questions relating to the origin, or 
affiliation and connexion, of languages. Here, too, the 
internal evidence, or that presented by the languages 
themselves, is indispensable, and is the main considera- 
tion ; but such external evidence as is to be had is not to 
be disregarded. It demands, at least, always to be ex- 
plained, and to be shown to be consistent with the in- 
ternal evidence ; and it sometimes serves as a useful 
index to the direction in which the internal evidence is 
to be looked for or pursued. 

Were it only for the latter reason, it would be conve- 
nient in questions of this nature to take the External or 
Historical evidence as the basis of our inquiries ; but it 
is also natural to begin with that, as consisting usually 
of facts that were well known long before much or almost 
any attention was drawn to the Internal evidence. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



II. The First of the facts constituting the External or 
Historical Evidence that we have in regard to the 
sources of the English language is, that the country 
in which it is spoken and has grown up appears 
clearly to have been once occupied, in whole or 
in part, by a Celtic population. 

I. The earliest express statement that has come down 
to ns in regard to the language spoken in the country 
now called England is that of Tacitus, who, writing in the 
first century of our era, says (Agricola, 11) of those of the 
Britons of his day who were nearest to Gaul, that they 
were probably of Gallic extraction, and that their speech 
was not very different from that of the Gauls (serrno hand 
multum diversus). 

But Caesar (B. G. v. 12), writing a century before 
Tacitus, although he says nothing about the language of 
the Britons, in asserting as a fact what Tacitus advances 
as a probability, that the Britons dwelling along the coast 
opposite to Gaul had originally come from that country, 
particularises Belgium as the part of Gaul whence they 
had emigrated ; and elsewhere (i. 1, and n. 4) he tells us 
that the Belgae were for the greater part of Germanic 
descent, and that both they and the Aquitani differed in 
language, as well as in institutions and laws, from the 
proper Gauls, or Celts as they were called in their own 
tongue. 

It has thence been argued by some speculators that 
the language of this portion of the population of Britain 
must, when the country first became known to the Eo- 
b 2 



4 OUTLINES OP THE HISTORY OF 

mans, have been not a Celtic but a Germanic language. 
This view was first proposed by the Scottish antiquary, 
Sir John Clerk of Pennicuick, in a " Dissertation on the 
Ancient Language of Britain," written in 1742, but first 
published in 1782, in the first volume of the Bibliotheca 
Topographica Britannica; and it was afterwards taken up 
and maintained, with his usual cleverness and plausibility, 
by John Pinkerton, in his " Enquiry into, the History of 
Scotland preceding the Reign of Malcolm III." (2 vols. 
8vo, Edinburgh, 1789 ; republished in 1794 and in 1814). 
Pinkerton states (i. 363) that he had not happened to 
see Clerk's Dissertation till after the materials for his 
own work were collected. 

It is still, however, matter of dispute whether the 
language of the Belgians was Germanic or Celtic. It is 
contended by many that Caesar's statement can only 
mean that they spoke a different dialect from the people 
of Celtic Gaul ; and that, if they were Germans by 
descent, they had, after their settlement in Gaul, ex- 
changed their ancestral speech for the common language 
of that country. 

II. In this undecided state of the question respecting 
the language of the Belgse, recourse has been had, for 
evidence in regard to the earliest language spoken in 
Britain, to the ancient topographical nomenclature of 
the country, that is, the oldest names of places and 
natural objects in it. These, which are always originally 
significant, are the surest evidence we can have in regard 
to the language spoken in any country at the time when 
they were imposed. The ancient topographical nomen- 
clature of Britain is elaborately investigated by George 
Chalmers in the first volume of his Caledonia (3 vols. 
4to, 1810—24) ; and the subject has also been more re- 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. O 

cently discussed by the late Rev. Eichard Garnett in a 
paper printed in the Proceedings of the Philological So- 
ciety (i. 119). Whatever differences of opinion may still 
exist upon subordinate points, there is now no dissent 
from the general conclusion arrived at by both of these 
writers, that the oldest topographical nomenclature every- 
where in Britain is Celtic. This is the case in the parts 
of the country which Caesar states to have been colonized 
from Belgic Gaul, as well as elsewhere. Kent, for in- 
stance, is a Celtic name, and Thames is a Celtic name. 
Mr Garnett further holds the topographical nomencla- 
ture of France and that of ancient South Britain to be- 
long to the same form of the Celtic, namely, the Cambrian, 
or "Welsh ; and he conceives that to be the earliest and 
least corrupted form now subsisting. 

It should be observed, however, that the fact of the 
most ancient topographical nomenclature of the Belgic 
parts of Gaul and Britain being Celtic does not prove 
that the Belgic colonists in either case spoke a Celtic 
language ; for the names may have been imposed by pre- 
ceding occupants of Celtic race. But it proves that the 
parts occupied by the Belgic colonists must, as well as 
the rest of the country, have been at one time in the 
possession of a Celtic population ; which is enough for the 
purpose in hand. 

It may also be mentioned that Mr Garnett's supposi- 
tion, of the most ancient British topographical names 
being all Welsh, is inconsistent with a theory which was 
first put forward by the learned Edward Lhuyd, in the 
Preface to the Welsh part of his Archaologia Britannica 
(folio, Oxford, 1707).* Lhuyd argues, from the names 

* Of this Preface, which is in "Welsh, there is an English translation 
in the Third Appendix to Archbishop Nicholson's Irish Historical Li- 
brary. 



6 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF 

of rivers and mountains throughout both Wales and the 
rest of South Britain, that a Celtic people of the Irish or 
Gaelic branch must have preceded the "Welsh in the 
occupation of the country ; and that these Gwydhelians, 
as he calls them, had been forced by the Welsh to retire 
for the greater part to the North and to Ireland. 

III. But we must be held to have sufficient proof of 
the general statement at the head of the Section in the 
standing testimony of the great fact, that a considerable 
Celtic population, retaining its peculiar speech, still sub- 
sists in the occupation of a part of South Britain (the 
district that we now call Wales), its possession of which 
is historically known to be of very ancient origin, and 
cannot be probably accounted for otherwise than upon its 
own tradition, supported by the whole current of its na- 
tional literature, that it is the remnant of a race which 
the Bomans found spread over a much larger extent of 
the country, and the portion of which that escaped de- 
struction, or preserved its independence, on the Saxon 
invasion, was then forced to retire within its present nar- 
row limits. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



J 

III. The Second fact is, that from about the middle of 
the First Century of our era till after the com- 
mencement of the Fifth, or for not much short of 
400 years, South Britain was a Province of the Ro- 
man Empire, and extensively occupied by colonists 
speaking the Latin tongue. 

The first Roman invasion of Britain under Julius 
Caesar took place late in the summer of the year B.C. 55. 
According to a calculation of Dr Edmund Halley, the 
eminent astronomer, published in the Philosophical Trans- 
actions* the day was the 26th of August. On this occa- 
sion, the Roman general remained only till about the 20th 
of September, nor did he advance into the country ; but 
he returned in the May of the year following, B.C. 54, 
when he compelled several of the princes and states in 
the south-eastern part of the island to surrender and give 
him hostages. f The Britons were left unmolested and 

* No. 193 (for March— June, 1691) ; vol. xvii. p. 495. 

f It has generally been supposed that Caesar on both his expedi- 
tions to Britain landed on the east coast between Dover and Deal, 
having sailed from Wissant, about midway between Boulogne and 
Calais ; but Professor Airy, the Astronomer Royal, has lately shown it 
to be in the highest degree probable that the Portus Itius, from which 
he embarked, was at the mouth of the Somme, much farther to the 
south, and that he made his descent on the coast of Sussex, at or near 
the same point, between Pevensey and Hastings, which was selected 
for his invasion by William the Norman eleven centuries later. Pro- 
fessor Airy's views were first submitted in an anonymous communica- 
tion to the Athenceurriy dated 29th March, 1851 ; and were afterwards 
more fully expounded in a paper read before the Society of Antiquaries, 
8th and 22d January, 1852, and printed in the Archceolo gia, vol. xxxiv. 
pp. 231—250. London, 1S52. 



8 OUTLINES OP THE HISTORY OF 

unvisited from this time, till, in B.C. 26, on Augustus 
threatening a new invasion, they sent an embassy to him 
in Gaul, and consented to acknowledge the Eoman do- 
minion by the payment of tribute. The actual subjuga- 
tion of Britain, however, did not commence till a.d. 43, in 
the reign of the Emperor Claudius ; nor was it completed 
before a.d. 84, when Julius Agricola, who had been first 
appointed to the supreme command there in a.d. 78, in 
the reign of Yespasian, resigned and returned to Rome in 
that of Domitian, after having in seven campaigns over- 
run the country to a considerable distance beyond the 
Forth, and also sailed round the island and reduced the 
Orkneys. 

The passages in the ancient Greek and Latin writers 
relating to the connexion of the Romans with Britain 
have been collected by Camden and others; but most 
carefully and fully (though still not completely) in the 
" Monumenta Historica Britannica ; or, Materials for the 
History of Britain, published by command of Her Ma- 
jesty" (folio: London, 1848). They fill 120 pages of 
that work. 

The Roman dominion ceased to be acknowledged by 
the Britons in a.d. 409, in the reign of the Emperor 
Honorius ; and in a.d. 418, according to the Saxon 
Chronicle, "the Romans collected all the treasures that 
were in Britain, and some they hid in the earth, so that 
no one has since been able to find them ; and some they 
carried with them into Gaul." The account given by 
the Saxon historian Ethelwerd (writing in Latin in the 
tenth century) is, that in this year those of the Roman 
race who were left in Britain, not being able to endure 
the multiplied menaces of the natives, buried their trea- 
sure in holes dug in the earth (scrobibus), imagining that 
they might have an opportunity of recovering it after- 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 9 

wards, a thing which never happened ; and, taking only a 
part of it with them, assembled at or on the, water (in 
undo), set sail, and retired to Gaul. The earlier nar- 
rative of Grildas, which is of the sixth century, but is ex- 
tremely confused and obscure, contains nothing to this 
effect, but speaks of Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom Beda 
and other writers place at the head of the Britons in the 
latter part of the fifth century, as the only individual of 
Roman extraction who was then left alive in the island. 

It is in the highest degree improbable that the retire- 
ment or expulsion of the inhabitants of Roman descent 
can have been so complete as these statements would 
make it. From the number of settlements which both 
history and their remains on or under the soil prove the 
Romans to have possessed in all parts of the country, 
from the Channel to the Friths of Forth and Clyde, com- 
prehending many towns and villas, as well as mere military 
stations, it is evident that in the space of between three 
and four centuries, during which the island had been a 
Roman province, it had been extensively colonised, like 
most of the other provinces, from the original central seat 
of the empire, and that the portion of its population thus 
formed must in all likelihood have been very consider- 
able and very widely diffused. 

But, although it cannot be doubted that an extended 
Latin civilisation grew up in Britain in the course of the 
long space of time that it continued under the Roman 
dominion, we are not informed by any express notices in 
the ancient writers in how far Latin became the language 
of the country. Tacitus, however, affirms (Agric. 21), 
that already by a.d. 79, when Agricola had made his 
second campaign, the sons of the chiefs, under his judicious 
measures, were beginning to be attracted to liberal studies, 
and to be becoming ambitious of excelling in the eloquent 



10 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

use of the Boman tongue, which they had heretofore de- 
spised. And Juvenal about the same early date speaks 
(Sat. xv. Ill) of the art of oratorical pleading being taught 
to the Britons by their eloquent neighbours the Gauls, 
and of the feeing of counsel being now practised even in 
Thule. Agricola, Tacitus tells us, preferred (or, at least, 
professed to prefer) the natural genius of the Britons to 
the studied acquirements of the Gauls.* 

From the name of the Saxon Border (Limes Saxonicus) 
having been borne in the Eoman time by a portion of the 
eastern and south-eastern coast of Britain (from Brano- 
dunum, now Brancaster, in Norfolk, to the Portus Adurni, 
probably either Pevensey or Aldrington, in Sussex), it 
has been argued that the Saxons must have already 
established themselves in some portion of this district. 
But the only Saxon settlement that could have given rise 
to the name would have been a settlement extending over 
the whole line of coast so denominated; and it is im- 
possible that that could have passed unrecorded. There 
seems to be no reasonable objection to the commonly 
received interpretation of the name, as meaning simply 
the coast along which the Saxon pirates were wont to 
make their descents. f 

Many small bodies of barbarians, however, were trans- 

* See upon this subject a paper by Dr Latham in the transactions of 
the Historical Society of Lancashire for 1857. 

f I am happy to find myself confirmed in the opinion here expressed 
by the authority of Mr Guest in his interesting and valuable paper 
" On the Early English Settlements in South Britain," published in the 
" Memoirs communicated to the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological 
Institute, held at Salisbury, July 1849;" 8vo, Lond. 1851 ; pp. 33, 
34. The other view, which has been recently put forward by Palgrave, 
Lappenberg, and Kemble, may be found in D'Anville's Etats Formes 
en Europe, %c. Par. 1771 ; p. 20. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 11 

ferred to and located in Britain by the Eomans them- 
selves. Upwards of forty barbarian legions, it has been 
reckoned, composed some of natives of Germany, some of 
Moors, Dalmatians, and Thracians, after having served 
their time in the armies of the empire, were settled and 
put in possession of lands in various parts of the island, 
principally upon the north-eastern coast, and in the 
neighbourhood of the Eoman walls (Palgrave's History 
of the Anglo-Saxons, 1838, p. 20) . But these small bodies 
must have soon melted into the surrounding population, 
and can neither have preserved their own dialects nor 
produced any distinguishable effect upon the general 
language of the country. 



12 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOBY OF 



IV. The Third fact, and the most important of all, is, 
that, after the extinction of the Roman dominion, 
the country was in great part conquered, taken 
possession of, and occupied by certain tribes of 
Gothic race and language, whose descendants have 
ever since formed the bulk of its population. 

The commonly received account rests principally upon 
the authority of the Historia Ecclesiastica of Beda, who 
was born at Jarrow, in the bishopric of Durham, a.d. 
673, and died a.d. 735. Beda makes the invaders, to 
whom he gives the general name of Angles or Saxons 
(Anglorum sive Saxonum gens), to have consisted of three 
nations or tribes, properly distinguished as the Saxons, 
the Angles, and the Jutes (or Vita).* 

The Saxons, he says, came from that region in Grer- 
many which was in his own day known by the name of 
the country of the Old Saxons ; that is, the modern 
Duchy of Holstein, or the country between the Elbe 
and the Eider. The Angles he brings from a district 
immediately to the north of that occupied by the 
Saxons ; from his account, combined with others, the 
native country of the Angles has been supposed to have 

* Dr Smith, in his note to Beda, Hist. Eccles. I. 15, seems to say- 
that Vita is the reading of all the MSS. : — " Omnes librariorum, qui 
Vitas volunt, conatus." Yet Camden, quoting this very passage 
(Britannia, Gibson's translation, 1722, I. clviii.), expressly affirms 
that the MS. reading is not Vitas, but Gtitce. The editors of the 
Monumenta Britannica, adopting Juti in the text, give Vita as the MS. 
reading in the notes to two passages (i. 15 and iv. 16) ; but at a third 
passage (also in iv. 16) no other reading than Juti is noted. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 13 

been the part of the Duchy of Sleswig, still bearing the 
name of Angel or Angeln, lying between the Eider and 
the arm of the Baltic called, after the town at its extrem- 
ity, the Elensborg Wyck, or Eiorde. Beda says this dis- 
trict was reported to have remained uninhabited (desertus) 
ever since the invasion. The original country of the Jutes 
he places immediately to the north of that of the Angles, 
by which he may mean merely the upper part of Sles- 
wig, which is still also called South Jutland, although 
commonly the name Jutland is now restricted to the 
portion of the peninsula anciently known as North Jut- 
land. 

Beda is not quite consistent with other authorities, nor 
even with himself, in regard to the dates at which these 
several invading tribes arrived. The chronology which 
has been commonly deduced from his various statements 
is, that the Jutes came first, under the brothers Hengst 
and Hors, or Hengist and Horsa, in a.d. 449, or rather 
450 ; next the first division of the Saxons, under Ella, in 
477, and the second, under Cerdic, in 495 ; then the first 
body of the Angles in 527, but their principal host, under 
the command of Ida, not till 547. Mr Hardy, however, 
the learned editor of the Monumenta Historica Britannica 
(Chronological Abstract, 143), prefers the computation 
in the Historia Britonum of Nennius (a writer of the 
ninth century), according to which the arrival of Hengist 
and Horsa and their band would be in a.d. 428 * This 

* Gildas (10, 11) and Nennius (23) both state that, when Clemens 
Maximus revolted against the Emperor Gratian, he carried over with 
him to the continent all the military force then in Britain, and that 
these soldiers never returned, but settled in Armorica (Bretagne). This 
was in a.d. 383. We know, however, that long after this, in a.d. 407, 
the Roman army in Britain was powerful enough to set up, one after 
another, three pretenders to the empire, Marcus Gratian, and Con- 



14 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOEY OF 

is a point of little or no importance for our present pur- 
pose. But, supposing the three tribes to have spoken, as 
they probably did, different dialects, it becomes very im- 

stantine. In a subsequent passage (27) Nennius speaks of the Roman 
generals {duces Romanorum) having been on three several occasions 
(tribus vicibus) put to death by the Britons. Yet, after all this, it is 
added, the latter sought the help of the Romans against the Picts and 
Scots, and, having sworn submission, had an army sent to them. Gil- 
das (12, 14), and Beda, who follows and amplifies his account {Hist. i. 
12, 13), make three successive embassies to have been sent to Rome, 
the first and second of which were each successful in obtaining such as- 
sistance as sufficed to repel the barbarians for the time ; but the third, 
addressed to the Consul Aetius, proved ineffectual. From what Beda 
says here, and with more precision in his tract Be Sex Aetatibus Soeculi, 
the first and second of these embassies would appear to have been de- 
spatched between a.d. 414 and 419, the third in 446. The force, 
therefore, which was accorded in compliance with the second embassy, 
and which would, according to this version of the story, be the last 
Roman force that visited the island, may very well have left in the year 
418, as asserted by the Saxon Chronicle, and by Ethelwerd. (See 
ante, p. 8.) Beda states the first arrival of the Saxons to have taken 
place in the first year of the reign of the Emperor Marcian, which was 
a.d. 450, although he seems to have taken it for 449. There is no dis- 
pute about the date of the third embassy, in 446 ; but Mr Hardy sup- 
poses the first to have been despatched probably in 396, and the second 
in 435, assigning the arrival of the Saxons, as stated in the text, to the 
year 428 in the intervening space. This is also the date that is adopted 
by Camden, who is followed, among others, by D' Anville, Etats Formes 
en Europe, pp. 199, 200. But see the objections stated by Gibson (in 
part after Stillingfleet and Usher), Britannia, translation of 1722, pp. 
clx. and clxi. 

Consult upon the history of Roman Britain Lappenberg's England 
under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, translated by Thorpe (2 vols. 8vo, Lond. 
1845), i. 6 — 73; the Hon. Algernon Herbert's Britannia after the 
Romans, 2 vols. 4to, Lond. 1836 and 1841, and his Annotations to the 
edition of the Irish Translation of Nennius, printed by the Irish 
Archaeological Society, 4to, Dub. 1848 ; the Rev. J. C. Bruce's Roman 
Wall, 8vo, Lond. 1851 ; and Mr Guest's paper in the 1851 volume of 
the Memoirs of the Archceological Institute, already referred to. And 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 15 

portant, in tracing the origin and history of the common 
language which grew np among them, to understand in 
what parts of their new country they severally settled. 
The accepted account ofirthis matter derived from Beda 
and other sources, is, that the Jutes occupied Kent and 
the Isle of Wight, with part of the opposite coast 01 
Hampshire ; that the Saxons established themselves in all 
the rest of the country to the south of the Thames and 01 
the Bristol Avon, and also in Essex and Middlesex, and 
the southern part of Hertford ; and that the Angles took 
possession of all the rest of England, which also received 
its name (originally Aengla-land, or Engla-land) from them, 
their dominion extending, apparently, as far north as to 
the Eorth and the Clyde. The various bodies of the old 
Celtic population, however, maintained their independ- 
ence in the kingdoms or principalities of Strath- Clyde (or 
Beged, that is, the Kingdom), Cumbria (or Cumberland), 
North and South Wales (Cambria), and Cornwall, along 
the whole line of the western coast. 

There is little doubt that among the invaders there 
must also have been a considerable proportion of Frisians, 
either from the Greater Eriesland {Frisia Major), former- 
ly extending from the Scheld to the Weser, or from the 
Lesser Eriesland (Frisia Minor), lying on the western 
coast of Sleswig, opposite to the Isle of North-Strand, 
whence these northern Erieslanders were called Strand- 
frisii. Beda himself, in another place (Hist. Fccles. y. 
9), enumerates the Fresones among the nations from 
whom the Angles or Saxons inhabiting Britain are known 
to have derived their origin. Sir Erancis Palgrave goes 
the length of saying {Hist. Anglo-Sax. 33, 34), that " the 

upon the general subject of the Romans in Britain, see an interesting 
article in the Edinburgh Review, No. 191 (for July 1851), pp. 177 — 
204. 



16 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

tribes by whom Britain was invaded appear principally 
to have proceeded from the country now called Fries- 
land ; for, of all the continental dialects, the ancient 
Frisick is the one which approaches most nearly to the 
Anglo-Saxon of our ancestors." — (See also his " Rise and 
Progress of the Eng. Commonwealth," 41, 42.) 

The whole account preserved by Beda of the invasion 
of Britain by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes has been 
treated as of scarcely any historical value by Mr Kemble 
in his work entitled " The Saxons in England," 2 vols. 
8vo, 1849 (see vol. i. pp. 1 — 34). But, whatever force 
may be allowed to the reasoning by which Mr Kemble 
would establish, on the one hand, the mixture of poetical 
or fabulous elements in the narrative, and, on the other, 
its unauthorised character for the greater part, it seems 
very unlikely that it can be wholly without foundation 
in so far as respects the only portion of it with which we 
are here concerned, namely, that comprising the descent 
of the invaders from a diversity of tribes, the locations of 
the different tribes in the conquered country, and also 
the districts on the Continent whence they had severally 
come. Some distinction between the Saxons and Angles, 
indeed, is sufficiently attested by the existence of those 
two general appellations, to say nothing of those of 
such particular states or . districts as Essex, Sussex, 
"Wessex, East Anglia, &c. In discriminating the Saxon 
and Anglian populations, Beda was dealing with facts 
lying under his eye, and as to which he could hardly be 
mistaken, more especially if, as is nearly certain, the 
original difference of descent was still marked by a dia- 
lectic difference of speech. And, perhaps, this may not 
have been the only difference that divided, and always 
had divided, the Anglian and Saxon states. ]S"or would 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 17 

J 

two distinct and possibly rival populations, set down be- 
side one another in a new country, readily lose the me- 
mory of their original seats. Indeed, it hardly, can be 
seriously made matter of dispute that the Angles and 
Saxons of Britain were offshoots from the Angli and 
Saxones of the Continent : — the Angli, who are first men- 
tioned by Tacitus in the first century ; the Saxones, who 
are first mentioned (at least under that name) in the 
second century by Ptolemy. 

With regard to the Jutes, however, the case is not so 
clear. In the third edition of his work on the English 
Language (London, 1851), Dr Latham (pp. 10 — 12) has 
endeavoured to show that, although Jutland in Denmark 
undoubtedly took its name from a people called the Jutes, 
the derivation of any part of the invaders of Britain, after 
the fall of the Roman Empire, from that people, is a mis- 
take arising from Beda (whose name for them, as we have 
seen, appears to be, not Juti, but Vitce), or, it may be, 
some preceding writer whom he copied, having confounded 
the Celtic element Wiht in Wikt-saetan (the Wight-peo- 
ple, or inhabitants of the Isle of Wight) with the similar 
element in Vit-land, or With-land, which are other forms 
of the name of the peninsula commonly called Jutland. 

It has been usual, also, with modern writers to assume 
that the continental region from which the distinctively 
Saxon portion of the invaders of Britain was derived was 
not confined to Beda's Old Saxony, or the district now 
called Holstein, but probably extended as far westward 
along the coast of the North Sea as to the Weser, or even 
to the Rhine. 



18 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 



V. The Fourth fact is, that in the latter part of the 
ninth century extensive settlements were effected 
in the North-eastern parts of England by a Scandi- 
navian people, the Northmen or Danes. 

"Whatever may be the origin or etymological meaning 
of the term Danes, it had come by the eighth century to 
be the common name for those bands of piratical rovers, 
from the countries around the Baltic, who were otherwise 
called Northmen or Normans. They are held to have 
been drawn from every part of the extensive region which 
the ancients designated Scandinavia ; but it is remarkable 
that, whereas that appellation is understood in its strictest 
sense to include only the modern Sweden and Norway, 
it is to Denmark that the Danes have left their name. 
The geographical position of Denmark, divided from the 
proper Scandinavian countries by so considerable an ex- 
tent of sea, will hardly allow us to interpret the name as 
signifying the Border land of the Danes, taking mark 
here in the same sense which it has in the names of the 
Anglian kingdom of Mercia (bordering on Wales), the 
old French country of La Marche (bordering on Limou- 
sin), and the Mark of the Germans, and the Marca of the 
Italians, in various instances. In other cases, however, 
mark must be understood as meaning merely a district or 
territory marked off, or simply what we commonly call a 
land or country. 

It is further worth noticing that the modern kingdom 
of Denmark comprehends all the districts from which 
issued, according to the old accounts, the several tribes 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 19 

J 

who invaded Britain upon the fall of the Eoman empire. 
And the Danes proper (who may be considered to repre- 
sent the Jutes) ; the Angles, who live between the Bight 
of Flensborg and the river Schley on the Baltic ; the 
Frisons, who inhabit the islands along the west coast of 
Jutland, with a part of the bailiwick of Husum in Sles- 
wig ; and the Germans of Holstein (Beda's Old Saxons) 
are still all recognised by geographers and ethnographers 
as distinct races (See Universal Geography of Malte-Brun 
and Balbi, English translation, p. 478). 

The Latin mediaeval chroniclers, under whatever notion, 
often speak of the Danes by the name of Daci, or Dacians. 

The earliest notice of the appearance of the Danes in 
England occurs in the Saxon Chronicle under the year 
787. The passage is as follows : — " Her nom Beorhtric 
cyning Oifan dohtor Eadburhge to wive. And on his 
dagum cuomon aerest 3 scipu JSTorthmanna of Haeretha 
lande. And tha se gerefa thaerto rad, and hie wolde 
drifan to thaes cyninges tune, thy he nyste hwaet hie 
waeron ; and hiene mon thaer ofslog. Thaet waeron tha 
aerestan scipu Deniscra monna the Eangelcynnes lond 
gesohton." That is : — " This year took King Beorhtric 
[of Wessex] King Offa's daughter Eadburhge to wife. 
And in his days came first three ships of Northmen from 
Haeretha land.* And then the reeve thereto rode ; and 
them would have driven to the king's town, because he 
wist not what they were ; and him they there slew. 
These were the first ships of Danish men that sought the 
land of the English race." 

* The word Haeretha, I believe, is not elsewhere found. It might 
almost be suspected to be a perversion or corruption of Haethena (of 
the Heathen). A common name for the Danes, Avith the Latin chroni- 
clers, is Gentiles, or Pagani. 

c 2 



20 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

In 867 the Danes made themselves masters of all the 
eastern part of the kingdom of Northumbria, comprising 
the modern counties of Northumberland, Durham, and 
York, besides those of Cumberland, "Westmoreland, and 
Lancashire, along the western coast. This conquest was 
speedily followed by the acquisition of many of the prin- 
cipal towns in Mercia (or the Midland Counties) ; which, 
along with East Anglia and the former kingdoms of Kent 
and Sussex, had for some time acknowledged the sove- 
reignty of the King of "Wessex, now beginning to be 
looked up to, in virtue of this extended dominion, as the 
supreme ruler of England. East Anglia (comprising 
Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridge) was next attacked; 
then Wessex itself; and at last, in the year 878, King 
Alfred was glad to conclude the war by a treaty with 
Grodrum, or Gruthrun, the Danish king or chief, by which 
he consented to cede to the invaders all the country lying 
along the eastern coast from the Humber to the Thames. 
Here accordingly, and in their conquered kingdom of 
JNorthumbria, farther to the north, these foreigners set- 
tled, probably in considerable numbers, and, although 
acknowledging themselves the subjects of the English 
king, were governed by their own laws ; so that this part 
of the kingdom came from henceforth to be known by the 
name of the Danelagh (or Dane-law) . 

Finally, in 1013 the conquest of all England was ef- 
fected by the Danish king S-veyn; and the crown con- 
tinued in the possession of his descendants till 1012. 
During all this space, however, it is to be observed, the 
laws continued to be promulgated for the English in their 
own tongue. Nor is there any reason for supposing that 
the Danes ever extended their occupation of the country 
beyond the limits of the territory made over or abandoned 
to them in the reign of Alfred. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. J 21 



VI. The Fifth fact, and the one next in importance to 
the Third, is, that in the middle of the eleventh 
century England was conquered by the Normans, 
who were originally Danes, but had been settled 
in France for about a century and a half, and had 
by this time exchanged their ancestral Scandina- 
vian tongue for the Neo-Latin tongue called French. 

A body of Danes, or Northmen, under their leader 
Hrolf, or Eollo, surnamed the Ganger (whatever may 
have been intended to be expressed by that epithet), 
after an unsuccessful attempt to make good a footing in 
England, had, a few years before Gruthrun and his follow- 
ers obtained their cession of territory from King Alfred, 
turned to the opposite coast of France, and effected their 
first descent in the province which at last, in 912, was 
yielded up to them by King Charles the Third, styled the 
Simple, and thereupon received the name of Normandy, 
which it retains to this day. 

The cession of Normandy to Eollo by Charles the 
Simple would seem to have been a transaction very much 
of the same kind with the cession of the Danelagh to 
Gruthrun by Alfred the Great. But, while the North- 
men of England, after the death of Gruthrun, appear to 
have been left without a head of their own race, those of 
Erance preserved at least the form of a distinct nation- 
ality under the descendants of Eollo, who continued to 
rule over the territory which their ancestor had acquired 
as all but independent sovereigns, with the title of Earls 
or Dukes of Normandy. 

It is probable, nevertheless, that the intermixture of 



22 OUTLINES OF THE HJSTOBY OE 

the French Northmen with the previous population of 
their new country may have heen fully as great as in the 
case of the Danes settled in England. "We know that 
both alike, after a few generations, dropped the use of the 
language of their ancestors, and adopted that of the na- 
tion in the midst of which they had set themselves down. 
This was a much greater change for the Normans of 
France than for the English Danes ; for the Norse and 
Anglian were tongues of the same Gothic stock, what- 
ever may have been their dialectic, or little more than 
dialectic, differences ; whereas the French was a tongue, 
as will be presently explained, of quite another descent. 

The comparatively near relationship between the lan- 
guages of the English and the Danes must have facilitated 
and hastened that amalgamation of the two races, or ab- 
sorption of the one into the other, which appears to have 
been completed before the next political revolution that 
the country underwent. 

This was its conquest by the French Normans in the 
year 1066, under their Duke William the Second, who 
thereupon took the title of William the First of England, 
and the designation of the Conqueror. He was the 
seventh Duke of Normandy, and the fifth in descent from 
Rollo. With the Norman king and court, and a numerous 
following of nobility, landoAvners, and soldiers, established 
in England by this revolution, was imported and ex- 
tensively introduced into use the language spoken by the 
Normans, which, as has been just stated, was by this time 
French. 

The French is one of what are called the Eomance or 
Neo-Latin tongues, by which terms are meant those cor- 
rupted forms of Latin that, in Italy and other countries, 
especially France and Spain, which had long been Eoman 
provinces, were employed after the fall of the Western 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 23 

Empire, first as the spoken and ultimately also as the 
literary languages. The names, however, of France and 
French have been given to the country formerly called 
G-aul, and to its general population and this their Neo- 
Latin speech, from its having been conquered in the 
latter part of the fifth century by a Grerman people (or 
rather confederacy of various tribes), called the Franks, 
who spoke, of course, a Germanic or Teutonic, that is a 
Grothic, language. The proper language of the Franks is 
distinguished in modern philology from the French by 
being termed the Francic, or Frankish. 

There were formerly two great dialects of the French 
language : that spoken to the south of the Loire, called 
the Langue d'Oc (or sometimes by modern philologists 
the Occitanian) ; and that spoken to the north of the 
Loire, called the Langue d? Oyl. Oc and Oyl (now vocal- 
ised into Oui, and probably a corruption of Volo) were the 
words expressive of assent, or answering to our Yes, in 
the two dialects. The French brought over to England 
by the Normans was a form of the Langue aVOyl; and it 
is out of that dialect chiefly that the present standard 
French has grown. Its great literary cultivators were 
the poets known as the Trouveres (from trouver, to find 
or invent). The poets, again, of the south of France 
were denominated Troubadours, which is merely the form 
of the same word proper to the southern dialect, often 
called the Provencal tongue, from the poets who com- 
posed in it in the age of its glory (the twelfth century) 
having been mostly patronised at the court of the Counts 
of Provence (first at Aries in that province, afterwards 
at Toulouse in Languedoc). It still subsists as a living 
tongue, though in ruins, and degraded to the condition 
of a patois, or merely rustic and unwritten dialect, or, 
rather, of a number of such dialects. 



24 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

Although, however, it was the Northern French that 
was brought over at the Norman Conquest, the Pro- 
vencal language and literature were also made familiar in 
England after another century by the accession to the 
crown (in 1154) of Henry Plantagenet as Henry II., 
whose marriage with Eleanor of Poitou had made him 
master of Poitou and G-uienne in the south-west of 
Prance, in addition to Normandy and his paternal domains 
of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine. Several Provencal com- 
positions are attributed to his son and successor, Eichard 
the First. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 25 



VII. It would thus appear that the languages which 
have been imported into and established in Eng- 
land by the successive populations that have con- 
quered or settled in it, and which may each, there- 
fore, have in a greater or less degree contributed 
to the formation of its existing language, belong 
to three several "branches of the Indo-European 
Family ; the Celtic, the Gothic, and the Classical. 

What is called the Indo-European family of languages 
may be conveniently considered as distributed into the 
following branches : — 

1. The Sanscrit, including all tlae Asiatic tongues 

which appear to be derived from the Sanscrit, or 
from the Zend (the language of the ancient Per- 
sians, or, rather, of the Medes). This is some- 
times called the Iranian or Arian branch, from 
Iran, the native name of Persia, of which Aria 
and Ariana appear to be other forms which came 
latterly to be commonly applied to particular pro- 
vinces of the empire. 

2. The Celtic. 

3. The Classical, comprising the Greek and the Latin, 

with their modern derivatives, the Romance tongues 
of Italy, Prance, and Spain. 

4. The Gothic. 

5. The Slavonic, or Sarmatian (under which may be 

included, not only the languages of the Russians, 
Poles, Bohemians, and other proper Slaves, but 
also the Old Prussian, and the dialects of Lithuania 



26 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

and Courland, which are known by the names of 

the Lettonian or Lettish, and the Curonian or 

Livonian). 

The term Indo-European has been substituted for Indo- 

Gerrnanic since it has come to be generally admitted that 

the Celtic languages belong to this family. 

It will be seen from what has been stated that in investi- 
gating the immediate sources of the English tongue we 
have nothing to do with either the Iranian or the Sarma- 
tian branch of the Indo-European family. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 27 



VIII. But the facts constituting the External or His- 
torical Evidence that we have regarding the 
sources of the language leave us nearly altogether 
uninformed as to the proportionate amount of each 
of its several probable ingredients, and as to the 
precise results that have been produced by their 
intermixture. This we can only learn from the 
Internal Evidence, or that afforded by the language 
itself. 

Wheneyee two or more populations, speaking different 
languages, are placed alongside of one another, under the 
same government, there arises a tendency, which, sooner 
or later, will, to a greater or less extent, become operative, 
towards the establishment of uniformity of speech. No 
such tendency arises in the case of contiguous populations 
living under different governments. The result of such a 
competition of any two languages will depend partly upon 
the genius and circumstances of the languages, partly 
upon those of the populations speaking them. This is, 
probably, all the length that we can safely go in stating 
the general law. The languages will be distinguished 
from each other in respect of their comparative states 01 
advancement and cultivation, the facility with which they 
may be acquired (which, again, may vary with the ac- 
quirers), the degree of tenacity and affection with which 
they are clung to (depending, it may be, upon their in- 
herent qualities, it may be upon merely their history and 
fortunes, or those of the races by whom they are spoken), 
and the attractions which they hold out, either by their 



28 OUTLINES OE THE HISTORY OE 

natural beauty and capabilities, their expressiveness, their 
convenience or importance politically, commercially, or 
for general purposes, or the amount and value of their 
literary stores. The populations speaking them will be 
distinguished by their comparative numbers, by the po- 
litical relation in which they stand to each other, by their 
respective social conditions, and even by the disposition 
of each, on the one hand to adopt new customs, or on the 
other to impose its own laws and usages upon its neigh- 
bours. The result, therefore, it is manifest, may be in- 
finitely modified, both in itself and in the manner in which 
it is brought about. 

The following cases, among others, may be con- 
sidered : — 

The retention of their proper language by the Greeks 
throughout all the vicissitudes of their history. 

The establishment of the Latin language in Graul and 
several other countries after their conquest by the Romans. 

The imposition of their own language by the Turks in 
those portions of their empire that were earliest wrested 
from the Christians. 

The substitution of the Arabic for the old languages 
in Egypt and the other Mahometan countries along the 
northern coast of Africa. 

The substitution, after the overthrow of the Roman 
empire, in some of its provinces of a G-othic, in others 
of a semi- G-othic, speech, in place of the Latin. 

The abandonment of their ancestral languages by the 
Franks, after their conquest of Graul; by the Normans, 
after their settlement in England ; and by the Manchoos, 
after their conquest of China. 

The retention of their ancestral language by the Angles 
and Saxons after their conquest of Britain. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 29 

When one of two competing languages completely 
gives way and disappears before the other, that result is 
always preceded by both languages having been generally 
spoken for a considerable period by the population that is 
destined to relinquish its ancestral speech, and by at least 
one generation of that population having grown up in the 
knowledge and use of both languages from childhood. It 
is only a language which it has itself acquired in childhood 
that one generation will ever transmit to another. 

But in some cases, when two languages come into com- 
petition, the one does not retire and altogether disappear 
before the other, but a combination takes place between 
them ; or, if one of them acquires the ascendancy, it is 
still more or less modified by the other. 

It is probable that some languages are naturally more 
impressible by a foreign element or influence than others. 
And the same language will vary in its impressibility at 
different stages of its growth, or according to the temper 
or circumstances of the population speaking it. It will 
also be more apt to be affected by the contact of one 
foreign language than of another. 

Most commonly the effect produced by one language 
upon another is confined to the vocabulary. It is very 
rarely, if ever, that two distinct grammatical structures 
become intermixed ; although sometimes, perhaps, a lan- 
guage may suffer some derangement of its grammar from 
coming into collision with another language. 



30 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOEY OF 



IX. The number of words which the English language 
appears to have derived from the Celtic of the 
original Britons, or their descendants the Welsh, 
is considerable ; but they are scattered and un- 
connected, and do not constitute a distinguishable 
department of its vocabulary. No stream of words 
has flowed into it from that quarter. There has 
been no chemical combination of the two lan- 
guages ; only a mechanical intermixture to a cer- 
tain extent. 

The most elaborate investigation that the question of 
the amount of Celtic in English has received is contained 
in a paper read before the Philological Society in 1844 by 
the late Eev. Richard Garnett, and published in the So- 
ciety's Proceedings, vol. i. pp. 169 — 180. 

Mr Garnett enumerates about two hundred English 
words (some of them, however, only provincial), which he 
conceives to have been borrowed from the "Welsh, and he 
affirms that twenty times as many might be produced. 
Among those which he instances are the following : funnel, 
from ffynel, literally, an air-hole ; garter, from gar tas, a 
shank tie ; kick, from cic, the foot ; cuts, in the expression 
" to draw cuts," from cwtws, a lot ; to wed, from gweddu, 
to yoke; bride, from priawd, meaning one won and 



The word leather Mr Garnett gives as an instance of a 
term which is found in many Teutonic (or Gothic) as well 
as in all the Celtic dialects, but which there are, neverthe- 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 31 

less, reasons for believing to be originally Celtic, in 
which class of languages alone its proper or primary 
meaning is to be detected. The Celtic term (lied in 
"Welsh, and leathan in Graelic) signifies fiat or broad* 

* Another of Mr Garnett's instances is the word mutton. This 
word we have, doubtless, received immediately from the French mouton, 
anciently moulton ; its termination being the common augmentative 
one of the modern Italian, in which language the word assumes the 
form of montone. But its emphatic portion, mut, mont, or moult, is 
found in all the leading Celtic tongues ; it is mollt in Welsh and Irish, 
mult in Gaelic, moltz in Cornish, and maut in Armorican. A curious 
theory with regard to this element has been started by Mr Grant of 
Corrimony, in his " Thoughts on the Origin and Descent of the Gael," 
8vo, Lond. 1827 ; he contends that it is identical with the Latmrnulta, 
or mulcta, the legal term for a pecuniary penalty, whence we have our 
English mulct, with the same meaning. There can be little doubt 
that the c has been inserted only to distinguish the word from the 
feminine of multus ; and the common explanations, therefore, connect- 
ing it either with mulceo or with mulco (which, besides, leave the t, an 
unquestionable part of it, unaccounted for) may be at once dismissed. 
If it is to be regarded as identical with the multa of multus, its true 
signification is probably numbered, or counted; and this view has the 
advantage of explaining the adjective also. It is nearly that taken by 
the learned Joseph Scaliger, who, in his Commentary on Yarro, makes 
it an obsolete imperative of the same signification with numera. Yarro 
himself, in his work on the Latin Language (De Lingua Latina, iv. 
36), conjectures that it must be an old form of una. On the other 
hand, the following passages from the Elder Pliny (writing in the first 
century of our era), and from Aulus Gellius (in the second), seem to 
lend considerable support to the view taken by Mr Grant : — " Pecunia 

ipsa apecore appellator Multatio quoque non nisi ovium boum- 

que impendio dicebatur : non omittenda priscarum legum benevolentia ; 
cautum guippe est, ne bovem priusquam ovem nominaret qui indiceret 
multam." — Plin. Nat. His. xviii. 3. "Multa quae appellator suprema 
instituta est in singulos duarum ovium, bourn triginta ; pro copia scilicet 

bourn, proque ovium penuria Minima midta est ovis unius. . . 

.... Quando igitur nunc quoque a magistratibus populi Romani more 



32 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOBY OF 

Some existing English words are recorded or known to 
have been originally Celtic. One instance is the word 
basket, whichis spoken of as having been a British word both 
by Juvenal (Sat. xii. 46) and by Martial (Epig. cciv. 99). 
Its Welsh form is bassgawd, apparently from base or hasg, 
an interweaving or netting. But it may still, perhaps, 
be questioned whether it was introduced into the English 
(or Saxon) directly from the Welsh, or through the medium 
of the Latin. 

It is argued by Mr Grarnett that the borrowing by the 
Saxons from the Britons of such words as this, significant 
of articles or of arts and processes with which they had 
been previously unacquainted, is a thing in itself likely to 
have happened. In other cases, he thinks, the new- 
comers may have been led to adopt a Celtic word now 
and then from its mere oddity. In illustration of this he 
quotes the word bother, which is commonly stated to be 
only another form of pother, no further account being 
given of either, but which Mr G-arnett holds to be a 
Celtic term often occurring in the Irish translation of the 
Scriptures in the sense of "to be grieved or troubled in 
mind." But it may perhaps be suspected that pother, at 
any rate, whatever may be the case with bother, is rather 

majorum multa dicitur, vel minima vel suprema, observari solet tit ores 
genere virili appellentur. Atque ita M. Varro verba haec legitima, 
quibus minima multa diceretur, concepit: — 'M. Terentius, quando 
citatus neque respondet neque excusatus est, Ego ei unum ovem 
multam dico.' Ac, nisi eo genere diceretur, negaverunt justam videri 
multam." — Aul. Gell. Noct. Att. xi. 1. It is remarkable, that, as the 
penalty designated multa was, it would thus appear, understood by the 
Romans to be in some way or otber, though nobody could tell how, 
connected not only with a sheep, but specially with a male sheep, so 
the latter, or more strictly a vervex, or wether, is the kind of sheep 
which the Celtic terms properly denote. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 33 

connected with the German poltern, to make a noise, to 
bluster, and gepolter, a rumbling noise.* 

It is to be remembered, in the consideration of this 
question, that, diverse and almost hostile in spirit and 
genius as the Celtic and Gothic are, they are still both 
branches of the same Indo-European family, and that 
they must have radically much in common. In the Latin 
language, too, from which the English has derived so 
large a portion of its vocabulary in later stages, there 
are both a Celtic and a Gothic element. 

A late French writer, Mons. W. E. Edwards, in a work 
entitled "Becherches sur les Langues Celtiques," 8vo, 
Paris, 1844, has (pp. 11 — 13) attempted to show that 
certain existing peculiarities of English pronunciation 
are to be attributed to the contact and action of the 
Welsh language. 

The two principal subsisting Celtic languages are the 
Welsh and the Irish: the Cornish and the Breton, or 
Armorican, being subordinate varieties of the former; 
the Scottish Gaelic and the Manks (or dialect of the Isle 
of Man), of the latter. 

* But in Shakespeare we have the word in a somewhat different 
form : — 

" Let the great gods, 
That keep this dreadful pudder o'er our heads, 
Find out their enemies now." — Lear, Hi. 2. 
This is the reading of all the Folios. The first Quarto (1608), 
however, has powther. 



34 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOEY OF 



X. There are scarcely to be found any words in the Eng- 
lish language which it can be supposed to have in- 
herited from the Latin spoken by the Boman co- 
lonists who had preceded the Angles and Saxons in 
the dominion, and, to a great extent, in the occupa- 
tion, of the country. Almost the only words of Latin 
origin that had established themselves in the lan- 
guage before the Norman Conquest are a few which 
it had received from the Roman ecclesiastics, whose 
visits commenced at the close of the sixth century, 
or from books. 

Such Latin ingredient as the English language may 
contain, derived from the speech of a portion of the 
population when the country was a province of the Ro- 
man empire, has been designated the Latin of the First 
Period. But it can hardly be said to exist. The only 
fragments or vestiges of it that have been instanced are 
the caster, cester, Chester, and whatever other variations 
they may be of bhe Latin castra (a camp) preserved in 
such names of places as Lancaster, Manchester, Leicester, 
&c. ; the coin of Lincoln, and a few other towns, an 
abridgment or corruption of colonia (a colony) ; and the 
word street, from stratum or strata. But this last is pro- 
bably as much a Gothic as a Latin word. 

What of the Latin language of Britain survived the 
imperial dominion would appear to have been preserved 
only in the Celtic of "Wales. But it is still an unsettled 
question how much of Latin there is in the AYelsh. 

The Latin ingredient introduced into the English lan- 
guage by the Roman churchmen, and by the learning 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 35 

which they imported, has been distinguished as the 
Latin of the Second Period. Attention was first di- 
rected to this part of the language by Mr G-uest, who, 
in his "History of English Bhythms" (2 vols. 8vo, 
Lond. 1838, yoI. ii. pp. 108, 109), has instanced the fol- 
lowing Latin words, among others, as found in manu- 
scripts of a very early date : — Mynster (from rnonasteri- 
urn), a minster or monastery; portic (from portions), a 
porch; cluster (from claustruni), a cloister ; munuc (from 
monachus), a monk; bisceop (from episcopus), a bishop; 
sanct (from sanctus), a saint ; calic (from calix), a chalice ; 
prcedician (from pr medicare), to preach; leon (from led), 
the lion ; peter selige (from petroselinum) , parsley ; pipor 
(from piper), pepper; &c. 

Mr Guest observes that the Latin terms introduced 
into the English at this stage of the language are nearly 
all concrete terms (or significant of things), whereas those 
introduced at a later date are mostly abstract (or signifi- 
cant of notions). 

It may be added, that in most of the instances men- 
tioned above the modern English word is not a modi- 
fication of the original formation, but a new formation 
obtained either directly from the Latin or through the 
medium of the French. This is evidently the case with 
monastery, porch (Er. porche), cloister (old Er. cloistre), 
saint (Er. saint), preach (Er. precher), lion (Er. lion), 
parsley (Er. persil). 



d 2 



OUTLINES OF THE HISTOBT OE 



XI. It has not yet been clearly proved that any con 
siderable part of the standard form of the English 
language is, in its origin, Scandinavian as dis- 
tinguished from Germanic ; though a Scandinavian 
element appears to be more or less recognisable in 
some of the provincial dialects, and farther investi- 
gation may probably show that its influence has 
been more extensive than has hitherto been gener- 
ally supposed. 

The Gothic branch of the Indo-European Family of 
Languages may be conveniently distributed into the fol- 
lowing subdivisions : — 

1. The Mceso- Gothic (the language spoken by the 

Goths, who, in the year 375, were permitted by 
the Emperor Yalens to occupy the Lower Moesia, 
now Bulgaria, near the mouth of the Danube and 
on the right bank of that river, having previously 
resided for at least a century on the opposite or 
northern bank, and having been recently converted 
to Christianity by TJlphilas, whose translation of 
part of the New Testament is the only specimen 
of their language that remains, being, however, the 
oldest specimen that exists of any Gothic tongue). 

2. The Germanic, or Teutonic (the various dialects 

spoken by the German nations) . 

3. The Scandinavian (the various dialects spoken by 

the nations settled around the Baltic, or in the 
countries included by the ancients under the some- 
what vague appellation of Scandinavia, and now 
known as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark). 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 37 

Of these subdivisions the second, or Germanic, is fur- 
ther divided into the High Germanic and the Low Ger- 
manic (meaning the dialects or languages respectively of 
Southern and of Northern Germany, of which the former 
is a comparatively elevated, the latter a low-lying, region). 
The principal, or what may be called the representative, 
High Germanic language is what is commonly known as 
the German, and is called by the Germans themselves 
the Roch Deutsch, which used to be Englished High 
Dutch. The chief exclusively Low Germanic tongue is 
that of Holland, to which the term Dutch has now come 
in this country to be restricted, and of which it is sig- 
nificant without any distinctive epithet. Ancient Ger- 
many, it is to be remembered, included the countries now 
known as Holland and the Netherlands. 

The principal existing Scandinavian dialects, again, are 
the Icelandic, the Danish and Norwegian (which are 
nearly the same), the Eerroic, and the Swedish. The 
Icelandic, which is regarded as the standard Scandina- 
vian tongue, is often called the Old Danish, or Norse ; 
and the latter term is sometimes used, in a larger accept- 
ation, to include all the Scandinavian dialects. 

The substance of the above statement may be thus 
exhibited in a tabular form : — 

Gothic. 
Mceso-Gothic. Germanic. Scandinavian. 



High Germanic. Low Germanic. , , , ' 

/ Icelandic. 

I Danish or Nor- 
1 wegian. 
German, &c. Dutch, &c. i Ferroic. 

\ Swedish. 

Of the Gothic invaders and conquerors of Britain in 
the fifth and sixth centuries, the Saxons may be admitted 



38 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

to have come, apparently, rather from Lower Germany 
than from Scandinavia. But the Continental localities 
assigned in the received account to the Jutes and the 
Angles would make them both to have been Scandinavian, 
at least according to modern notions. The subject, how- 
ever, is surrounded with obscurity. It is questioned, as 
we have seen, whether there were any Jutes among the 
invaders. Beda's account even of the quarter Avhence 
the Angles came is disputed. Little or nothing can be 
gathered from the manner in which they are mentioned 
either by Tacitus or by Ptolemy. Finally, we do not 
know that the languages of the Germanic and those of 
the Scandinavian stock were so widely distinguished at 
this date as they now are. 

The probability is, however, that there was a dialectic 
difference between the speech proper to the Saxons, distinc- 
tively so called, and that of the Angles, and also that the 
latter at least approximated more than the former to that 
of the Danes. The two facts from which these inferences 
may be drawn are ; — the first, that certain peculiarities of 
a Scandinavian character are to be found in the Anglian, 
even of a date anterior to the first Danish occupation of 
a part of England in the latter half of the ninth century ; 
the second, that the Scandinavian dialect imported by 
the Danish settlers and the Anglian, although it is un- 
questionable that they differed considerably, yet, if they 
were not from the first mutually intelligible, appear to 
have coalesced and melted into one language with much 
more facility than they would have done if there had not 
been also a near natural relationship between them. 

The differences between the Anglian and the standard 
form of the language spoken or written in England, and 
the traces of Scandinavianism to be found in the former 
and in the provincial dialects descended from it, have 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 39 

been expounded by Mr Kemble and by Mr G-arnett in 
several papers read before the Philological Society in 
1844 and 1845, and printed in the second volume of the 
Society's Proceedings. 

Although the Grothic conquerors of Britain were col- 
lectively called Saxons by the Celts whom they dispos- 
sessed (that having been the name by which the latter 
had been accustomed to know the persevering enemies 
from the opposite continent by whom their coasts had 
been so long assailed), they and their language were com- 
monly called English, that is, Anglian, by themselves, 
and the country England, or the land of the Angles. 
This, it has been argued, would seem to indicate that the 
said language was probably first employed in literature, 
not by the Saxons Proper of the south, but by the An- 
gles of the north. Even the political supremacy which 
was at last acquired by the former never was able to ob- 
literate the appellations bestowed upon the nation and 
upon the language by or with reference to the latter, any 
more than the .anguage spoken by the Eomans ever 
ceased to be called Latin, either by themselves or others. 
The head district of the Angles, as distinct from the 
Saxons, in Britain was the Kingdom of Northumbria, 
which in its full extent stretched from the Humber to 
the Prith of Porth, and included the modern counties 
of Northumberland, Durham, and York, with at least 
the eastern parts of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and 
Lancashire, besides all the south-east of Scotland. But 
East Anglia, comprehending modern Norfolk and Suffolk, 
with Cambridgeshire and a part of Bedfordshire, was also, 
as its name implies, an Anglian kingdom. So was Mercia 
in the main. Now these parts of the island, which 
had been taken possession of by the Angles in the sixth 
century, were also those that fell under the power of the 



40 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF 

Danish invaders of the ninth century, and in which they 
settled in considerable numbers. The Danelagh, as the 
range of country in question came to be called from 
the time of Guthrun's treaty with Alfred the Great (in 
878), appears to have comprehended all East Anglia and 
the greater portion of Mercia and jNForthumbria. The 
remarkable circumstance of the Danes having thus seated 
themselves exclusively in the Anglian districts cannot but 
awaken a suspicion that they found in the Angles a race 
more nearly related to themselves in blood and in lan- 
guage than the Saxons were. 

Specimens of the Anglian dialect of JNorthunibria have 
come down to us, extending certainly from the close, 
possibly from the commencement, of the seventh century 
to the latter part of the tenth, and therefore embracing 
a considerable period both before and after the Danish 
invasion. Mr Kemble arranges them in three classes: 
the first, consisting of a few inscriptions upon stones, 
mostly in runic characters, and of " uncertain, but pro- 
bably very great, antiquity;" the second, consisting of 
proper names found upon coins ; the third and most im- 
portant, of literary compositions. Of these last the prin- 
cipal are, a translation of the Psalms in one of the Cotton 
Manuscripts, which has been conjectured to be possibly 
as old as the beginning of the seventh century ; a frag- 
ment of verse attributed to the poet Caedmon, which, if 
it be genuine, must be of the latter half of that century ; 
a hymn composed on his death-bed by Beda, who died in 
the year 735 ; and two works which appear to belong to 
the latter part of the tenth century, the one known as the 
Durham 'Ritual, the other a Gloss, or literal interlined 
translation, of the Latin Gospels, in what is called St 
Cuthberfs or the Durham Book. 

This succession of specimens of the Anglian dialect, 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 41 

examined in chronological order, appears to afford evidence 
that the dialect, after the Danish occupation, gradually 
underwent certain changes which would be accounted 
for by the supposition of its having been subjected to the 
action of a Scandinavian element or influence. 

The most remarkable of these changes is that of the 
proper termination of the infinitive an into the old Norse 
termination a. The form a, or ce, appears in two or three 
instances in one of the stone inscriptions, that on the 
Euthwell Cross, which Mr Kemble, by whom it was first 
deciphered and explained, conjectures to be probably of 
the ninth century ; but in the Durham Ritual and in 
St Cuthberfs Book, which are both of the latter part of 
the tenth century, the new infinitive in a is used in all 
verbs, with the exception only of the substantive verb, 
Man, to be. 

Mr Garnett further adduces, in support of this theory 
of the gradually increased Scandinavianisation of the 
Anglian dialect under the contagion of that of the Danish 
settlers, the evidence afforded by certain specimens of the 
Northumbrian English of the fourteenth century, and also 
various peculiar forms and vocables still retained in the 
speech of the northern counties. 

The topographical nomenclature of the country occupied 
by the Danes is to this day partially Scandinavian. It is 
known historically, indeed, that they gave their present 
names to the towns of Derby and "Whitby, the terminat- 
ing syllable of which is the Norse form of the word for a 
town (otherwise wie, or wick, as in many English names, 
or vie, as in the Latin vic-us), and t^e same which makes 
part of the compound bye-laws (properly the laws of the 
town as distinguished from the general laws of the realm). 

In the twelfth century G-iraldus Cambrensis, aud in 
the thirteenth John of "Wallingford, speak of both the 



42 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OT 

population and the language of the northern parts oi 
England as still bearing manifest traces of a Danish 
origin. And in the middle of the fourteenth century 
Higden, after having mentioned the mixture of the original 
English, first with the Danes, and then with the Normans, 
adds, that the whole speech of the Northumbrians, espe- 
cially in Yorkshire, was so harsh and rude that the south- 
ern men, of whom he himself was one, could hardly under- 
stand it. 

It is generally admitted that, whatever may be the 
case with the standard English, several of its provincial 
dialects still exhibit more or less of a Danish or Scandi- 
navian element. Dr Latham {English Language, third 
edit. pp. 551, &c), while he regards the Lowland Scotch 
as being " probably more Danish than any South British 
dialect," describes the Danish admixture as very great in 
the dialect of Northumberland, as considerable in the 
dialects of the North and part of the West Biding of 
Yorkshire, at its minimum in those of Shropshire, Stafford- 
shire, and West Derbyshire ; the language of Lincolnshire 
he characterises as only " not Danish in proportion to the 
other signs of Scandinavian intermixture to be found in 
the district, such as the prevalence of the Danish termin- 
ation by in the names of towns, the Danish traditions, 
and the Danish physiognomy of the people ; " and the 
language of the old metrical romance of " Havelok the 
Dane," the subject of which is a Lincolnshire tradition, 
he declares to be " preeminently Danish." 

Mr G-uest, nevertheless {English Rhythms, ii. 186 — 207), 
finds traces of Danish " neither in our MSS. nor in our 
dialects." He admits, indeed, that there may possibly be 
something of the kind in the language of certain parts 
of the British islands which were " wholly peopled with 
Northmen — as the Orkneys, Caithness, and much of the 




THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 43 

eastern coast north of Forth ; " but, as for the vestiges 
of Dano-English commonly produced, he observes that 
" these may be found in districts where the Northman 
never settled, and are missing from counties where he 
certainly did ; " and he argues that the peculiarities which 
have always distinguished northern from southern English 
are to be sufficiently accounted for by the fact of the 
Angles having, before they left the continent, been the 
neighbours of the Danes. At the same time he holds 
that the language brought over by the Danes who settled 
in the country in the ninth century cannot have differed 
very much from English — that it must have been " little 
more than an English dialect." But is this likely after 
a separation of more than three centuries, even if the two 
languages had been previously ever so nearly related ? 

In an article on the " Saxon Language and Literature " 
in the Penny Cyclopcedia (published in 1841), Mr Gruest 
refers to the Gloss in St. Cuthberfs Book and to the 
Durham Ritual as furnishing the strongest of all the argu- 
ments against the supposed influence of the language of 
the Danish settlers, inasmuch, he observes, as we have all 
the peculiarities of the northern dialect in every page of the 
Gloss, and in many parts of the Ritual, although both 
were written before the Danish settlement took place. 
But, as we have seen, so far is this last assumption from 
being established that the Gloss and the Ritual are both 
assigned by others to the latter part of the tenth century. 
This is the judgment, not only of Mr Grarnett and Mr 
Kemble, but also, at least as to the Ritual, of Dr Latham 
{English Language, 549) . Nor is the Ritual assigned by 
its editor (Mr Stevenson), as Mr Guest supposes, to the 
early part of the ninth century ; Mr Stevenson only ex- 
presses an opinion that no part of the writing can be older 
than the commencement of that century. The Gloss, 



44 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOEY OF 

again, is declared in a memorandum on the MS. to have 
been made for a Bishop Aelfsig, who was probably 
either Aelfsig Bishop of "Winchester from a.d. 951 to 
958, or Aelfsig Bishop of Chester-le-street from 968 to 
990. 

" The Sexe" says Mr Quest {English Rhythms, ii. 190), 
" came from the south-western corner of the ancient 
Ongle, and were parted only by the Elbe from the Nether- 
landish races ; while the Engle, who landed at Bam- 
borough, came from the north-eastern coast, and were 
neighbours to the Dane." And to this statement he 
appends the following note : — " There is reason to believe 
that this word Sexe meant nothing more than Seamen, 
and that it was first given to such of the Engle as made 
piracy their trade. But after the Sexe settled in Britain, 
though, as it would seem, they sometimes called their 
speech English, their new country Engleland, and them- 
selves the Engle-kin, yet they were, for the most part, 
distinguished from the Engle of the north — the phrase 
Engle and Sexe being made use of when the writer would 
include the entire English population of the island. That 
the Sexe were a tribe of Engle, I think there can be little 
doubt. Everything tends to show, that at the beginning 
of the fifth century there were only four great G-othic 
races in the north of Europe — the Sweon, the Dene, the 
Engle, and the Swefe." The Sweon are the Suiones of 
Tacitus, supposed to have given its name to Sweden; the 
Swefe are the Suevi of the ancients, held to be the same 
with the modern Suabians. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 45 



XII. The foreign element which has mingled to by far 
the largest extent with the original snbstance of 
the English language is that peculiar modification 
of the Latin which grew up in the northern part of 
what was once the Roman province of Gaul, and 
which now forms the classical French. 

Theee was a good deal of intercourse between Eng- 
land and Normandy in the reign of the last of the so- 
called Saxon kings, Edward styled the Confessor, who, 
when he came to the throne in the year 1042, was nearly 
forty years of age, and had resided ever since his boy- 
hood at the Norman court ; for the Dukes of Normandy 
were his nearest relations, he and the father of William 
the Conqueror being cousins-german. He was, therefore, 
notwithstanding his birth and descent by the father's 
side, much more a Erenchman than an Englishman ; and 
we are told that he gave great offence to his subjects by 
the preference which he showed for the language of 
Erance, as well as by the number of ecclesiastics and 
others whom he drew over out of that country, and ap- 
pointed to offices and livings in England. 

But what planted the Erench language in England was, 
as has been already observed, the acquisition of the do- 
minion of the country by "William Duke of Normandy in 
the memorable year 1066. 

There is no probability in the assertion which has often 
been made that the Conqueror sought to extirpate the Eng- 
lish language, and to substitute the Erench in its place. He 
was incapable of entertaining a project so . palpably im- 



46 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOEY OE 

practicable. So far, in fact, was he from cherishing any 
dislike to the language of his new subjects that he is re- 
corded to have at first applied himself vigorously to learn 
English, till more pressing occupations compelled him to 
give up the attempt. He probably found that to conquer 
the language was harder work than to conquer the 
country at the age at which he had arrived ; for he was 
about forty when he became king. 

Among the consequences, however, of the great revolu- 
tion that had taken place, were the following : — 

1. A French-speaking royal family was placed upon 
the throne, surrounded, of course, by a Erench-speaking 
court. Even when the male line of the Conqueror died 
out, it was succeeded by another, that of the Plantagenets 
of Anjou, which was also Erench. It is known, in fact, 
that Erench continued to be the language in common use 
with every English king from the Conqueror down to 
Richard the Second inclusive, or to the end of the four- 
teenth century ; it is not known that, with the exception, 
perhaps, of Richard the Second, any one of them ever did 
or could speak English. 

2. A very great number of Normans, all speaking 
Erench, were brought over and settled in the kingdom. 
There were the military forces, by which the conquest 
was achieved and maintained, both those in command and 
the private soldiers ; there was a vast body of churchmen, 
spread over the land, and occupying eventually every 
ecclesiastical office in it, from the primacy down to that 
of the humblest parish or chapel priest, besides half filling, 
probably, all the monastic establishments ; there were all 
the officers of state and inferior civil functionaries down to 
nearly the lowest grade ; finally, there were, with few excep- 
tions, all the landholders, great and small, throughout the 
kingdom. The members of all these classes and their fami- 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 47 

lies must have been at first entirely ignorant of English, 
and they and their descendants would naturally continue 
for a longer or shorter time to use only the language of 
their ancestors. 

3. Although it may be inferred from the expressions 
of Ordericus Yitalis, a contemporary chronicler, that at 
first causes at law were pleaded in English even before 
the Conqueror himself, — for it was specially in order to 
be able to understand the pleadings without the inter- 
vention of an interpreter that William, according to that 
writer, set himself to study the language, — it would yet 
appear that Erench soon came to be exclusively the 
language of oral pleadings, at least in all the superioi 
courts. It could not well be otherwise, while the judges 
in those courts were all Normans. No law or express 
ordinance introducing such a practice is upon record; 
but there is an act of the legislature, as we shall presently 
find, which distinctly attests the fact of its existence. 
Neither laws nor deeds, however, were ever drawn up in 
Erench till more than a century and a half after the Con- 
quest ; all the new laws that were promulgated were in 
Latin till after the accession of Edward the Eirst (in 
1272), when they began to be sometimes in Latin, 
sometimes in Erench. Even the judgments or deci- 
sions of the courts in which the pleadings were in 
Erench were not always enrolled in that language, 
but often in Latin. And the charters granted by the 
Norman kings were frequently in English down to the 
accession of Henry the Second (in 1154), when Latin 
was substituted, which had been the language uniformly 
employed for the same purpose by the old kings down 
to the time of Alfred the Great. (See Palgrave's Rise 
and Progress of the English Commonwealth, i. 56; or 
Preface to E-ecord Commission edition of the Statutes of 



48 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOEY OP 

the Bedim ; or Luders's Tracts, 8vo, Bath, 1810, Tract 
Sixth.) 

The results, however, were : — 

1. That, Latin continuing to be as heretofore the 
language in which all learned works were written, in 
popular and fashionable literature the native language 
of the country was completely supplanted by the foreign 
tongue which the Normans had imported. 

2. That Trench came to be for a time understood and 
spoken extensively even by the population of English 
blood. 

Robert Holcot, writing in the beginning of the four- 
teenth century, informs us that there was no English 
taught in the schools of his time, but that the first lan- 
guage children learned was the French, and that through 
the medium of that when they went to school they 
were afterwards taught Latin. This practice, he says, 
was introduced at the Conquest, and had continued ever 
since. The teachers, in fact, who were all churchmen, 
were most of them foreigners, and altogether, or nearly 
altogether, unacquainted with English. Holcot' s state- 
ment is repeated by Ralph Higden about the middle of 
the same century, with some additional particulars.* 

* See the passage from Higden, as translated by Trevisa, in the 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 49 



XIII. In the new circumstances, political and social, in 
which England was placed by the Norman Con- 
quest, the old literary language of the country 
perished with the peculiar civilisation of which it 
formed a part, somewhat as did the classical Latin 
after the overthrow of the Western empire ; but 
more rapidly, in consequence of the important ad- 
ditional disadvantage of having to encounter the 
rivalry of a new civilisation, and of another tongue 
also beginning to be employed in literature. Ceas- 
ing to be read or patronised, it ceased to be written; 
and, no longer written, it soon came to be no 
longer understood. But there was still left in use 
as the common or vernacular tongue a species or 
form of English, differing from the English that 
was written before the Conquest chiefly by its 
comparative want or neglect of inflections ; and 
this became the germ of our modern national 
speech, or at least of so much of it as is of native 
origin. 

The only considerable composition in the original form 
of the English language that is known to have been 
written after the Norman Conquest is the portion of 
what is commonly called the Saxon Chronicle extending 
from that event to the death of King Stephen (in 1154). 
Before the latter date this Original English had apparently 
begun to be looked upon as a dead language, and to be 
only studied as such by a few antiquaries, like the Latin 
chroniclers Florence of Worcester and Henry of Hunting- 
don. It is commonly designated Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon. 



50 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

The term Anglo-Saxon, whether as applied to the lan- 
guage or to the people by whom it was spoken, must be 
understood to mean properly Saxon of England as dis- 
tinguished from Saxon of the Continent ; just as Anglo- 
Norman means Norman of England, as distinguished from 
Norman of the Continent. It is a compound formed 
on the principle of assuming Saxon as the name of the 
people and of the language, and England as that of the 
country. The Anglo-Saxon is merely one dialect of Saxon, 
as the Continental or Old Saxon is another. It cannot 
mean, as is sometimes supposed, the language of the An- 
gles and Saxons.* 

The following are some of the principal grammatical 
peculiarities in which the Original English (or Anglo- 
Saxon) differs from what is now called English : — 

The nouns, both substantive and adjective, are of three 
genders — masculine, feminine, and neuter. 

* Our ancestors, by whom this language was spoken, usually called 
their country England (Engla-land or Anglia), and themselves and 
their language English. These are the terms commonly used in the 
Chronicle. Beda entitles his Latin History Historic/, Gentis Anglorum 
Ecclesiastica, and, in enumerating the languages spoken in Britain, he 
designates that of the Angles and Saxons generally as lingua Anglo- 
rum. Sometimes, however, he has Angli sive Saxones, and Anglica 
sive Saxonica {lingua). The Latin chroniclers after the Conquest, 
meaning by the English the then mixed population and language, com- 
monly take advantage of the term Saxon to distinguish the people and 
the language before that revolution. It may be doubted, perhaps, in 
what sense exactly we are to understand the Angulsaxones of Asser, 
the biographer of Alfred the Great, before the Conquest, and the An- 
aulsaxones, Angli- Saxones, and Anglo- Saxones of Florence of Worces- 
ter after it, — whether, that is to say, as meaning the Saxons of England 
or the Angles and Saxons ; but in modern philology, at any rate, by 
Anglo-Saxon we can only be understood to mean, as has been said, the 
Saxon (or English) of England as distinguished from the Old Saxon 
of the Continent. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 51 

The cases are formed by variations of the termination, 
the terminations being : — 



Sing. Nom 


a, e, u, ow, or a consonant. 


Ace 


e, u, ow, or a consonant. 


Dat. & Abl. 


a, e, or a consonant (commonly 




an or urn). 


Gen 


a, e, or a consonant (commonly 




es or an). 


Plur. Nom 


a, e, u, or a consonant (commonly 




an or as). 


Ace 


always the same with the Nom. 


Dat. & Abl. 


always urn. 


Gen 


generally a, ena, or ra, some- 




times u. 



The definite article se, seo, thaet, is also used both as 
the demonstrative and as the relative pronoun. And the 
relative pronoun is often expressed by the indeclinable 
the, which has now come to be used as the definite article. 
The indefinite article was sometimes expressed by sum 
(our modern some), and often (as in Greek or Latin) was 
not expressed at all. 

The personal pronouns, — Ie (1), thu (thou), he, heo, 
hit (he, she, it), — as well as the possessive and interroga- 
tive pronouns, are also all declined. He and hit make 
his in the genitive sing. ; heo makes hire : whence evi- 
dently our his (down to a comparatively recent date used 
also as the genitive of the neuter, where we now say its) 
and her. Our their appears to be the gen. plur. hira 
(common to all the genders) ; as our they is the nom. plur. 
hi. Him, again, is the original dat. sing. masc. and neut., 
and dat. plur. in all the genders. 

In the Original English verb, the infinitive ends in an ; 
the present participle in ende, the past participle in od, or 
e 2 



52 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF 

ed, or d. The prefix ge is found with all parts of the 
verb, but most commonly with the parts expressing past 
time. In the present indicative the termination of the 
2d pers. sing, is a$t or st, that of the 3d pers. ath or th ; 
that of the plural persons ath. The terminations of the 
singular persons of the past tense are in the indicative, 
de, dest, de ; in the subjunctive, de throughout ; so that 
both tenses are completely distinguished from the past 
participle passive. The plural persons in both tenses aL 
end in don. 

The written form of our earliest English, it thus appears, 
is, like the Greek or the Latin, what may be called an in- 
flectional language. But we do not know that this was 
the only form of the language in use even before the Con- 
quest. In any country, the standard or literary language 
of which is highly inflectional, it would seem to be only 
what might be looked for, that there should exist also an 
oral dialect of a less artificial character and looser texture ; 
for it is found that, whatever may be the advantages of a 
certain kind which an elaborate system of inflection gives 
to a language, all the ordinary purposes of communication 
can be sufficiently attained with very little inflection, or 
even with none at all. It is remarkable that the language 
which is, perhaps, the oldest in the world, the Chinese, is 
also the least inflected. It is generally held, indeed, that 
the Chinese has probably never passed through or reached 
the inflected stage. But still the fact of its actual con- 
dition might awaken a suspicion that, perhaps, the latest 
stage of language may consist in its complete emancipa- 
tion from inflection and the shackles of grammar. Here, 
as in other cases, the simplest form of the instrument 
may be found to be the most perfect. It does not appear 
that the Chinese language is found by those to whom it 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 53 

is native to be, in consequence of its scanty or no gram- 
mar, deficient either in distinctness or even in rhetorical 
and poetical expressiveness. A few particles and other 
auxiliary or connecting words are stated to have made 
their way into the modern form of the language ; but it 
does not appear to have acquired anything of inflection 
properly so called. Indeed, the acquisition or growth of 
inflection by a language is probably unknown as an actual 
phenomenon. 

It has been conjectured that the Italian language, or 
something not very unlike the modern Italian, may have 
been a spoken dialect among the ancient Eomans. It is 
possible that in the same* manner each of the other Neo- 
Latin tongues, as they are called, may have sprung up 
and acquired in great part its peculiar form before the 
"Western Empire was overthrown, and its provinces over- 
run, or at least taken possession of, by the northern bar- 
barians. What is called the Eomaic, or modern Greek, 
may be substantially a popular idiom of ancient times. 
The great literary language of India, the Sanscrit, has its 
less elaborately artificial form, the Pracrit. So may there 
have been, even in the best days of the written or classical 
Anglo-Saxon, or Original English, a spoken dialect of the 
language which was comparatively uninflectional ; and 
this, preserved on the lips of the people, may have sur- 
vived the Norman Conquest, when the literary language 
sunk before its foreign rival. 

But if, as is commonly assumed, the irregular English, 
or Semi-Saxon, as it is commonly called, which we find to 
have been in use after the Conquest was a new form of 
speech, which had in some way or other been produced 
by that catastrophe, — was, in other words, the old na- 
tional language in ruins, — it may be held as certain that 



54 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOBY OF 

it was not through any direct action of the Trench lan- 
guage upon it, as used to be the received explanation, 
that the corruption of the Original English was brought 
about. There is not a trace of Trench to be found in the 
supposed new dialect. Nor would an intermixture of 
Trench have produced the peculiar change which dis- 
tinguishes that dialect from the old regular English, or 
Saxon. 

It has been urged, moreover, that such a change, con- 
sisting in the breaking up of the inflectional system of 
the language, if it cannot be affirmed to have taken place 
in conformity with a tendency inherent in all languages, 
is at least only what has happened, in a greater or less 
degree, to every other language of the stock to which the 
Original English belongs. The first English writer by 
whom attention was called to this last consideration was 
probably the late Dr Alexander Murray, who died in 
1813, though his History of European Languages was not 
given to the world till 1823. He there observes (i. 21), 
speaking of the change which the English language is 
supposed to have undergone in the period immediately 
subsequent to the Conquest: — "A similar process was 
observable, at the same time, in the kindred dialects of 
Holland and Germany, though exposed to no external 
violence. .... These continental tongues insensibly left 
the greater part of the inflections which they inherited 
from antiquity." But the fullest and most distinct state- 
ment upon the whole question is that of the late Mr 
Price, in the Preface to his edition of Warton's History 
of English Poetry (1824, p. 109) :— " An influx of foreign- 
ers, or a constant intercourse with and dependence upon 
them, may corrupt the idiom of a dialect to a limited ex- 
tent, or charge it with a large accumulation of exotic 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 55 

terms, but this change in the external relation of the 
people speaking the dialect will neither confound the 
original elements of which it is composed nor destroy the 
previous character of its grammar. The lingua franca, 
as it is called, of the shores washed by the Mediterranean 
Sea contains an admixture of words requiring all the 
powers of an erudite linguist to trace the several ingredi- 
ents to their parent sources ; yet, with all the corruptions 
and innovations to which this oddly assorted dialect has 
been subjected, it invariably acknowledges the laws of 
Italian grammar. A similar inundation of foreign terms 
is to be found in the German writers of the seventeenth 
century, where the mass of Latin, Grreek, and Trench ex- 
pressions almost exceeds the number of vernacular words ; 
yet here again the stranger matter has been made to 
accommodate itself to the same inflections and modal 

changes as those which govern the native stock 

That some change had taken place in the style of com- 
position and general structure of the language since the 
days of Alfred, is a matter beyond dispute; but that 
these mutations were a consequence of the Norman in- 
vasion, or were even accelerated by that event, is wholly 
incapable of proof; and nothing is supported upon a 
firmer principle of rational induction than that the same 
effects would have ensued if William and his followers 
had remained in their native soil. The substance of the 
change is admitted on all hands to consist in the sup- 
pression of those grammatical intricacies occasioned by 
the inflection of nouns, the seemingly arbitrary distinc- 
tions of gender, the government of prepositions, &c. 
How far this may be considered as the result of an innate 
law of the language, or some general law in the organisa- 
tion of those who spoke it, we may leave for the present 



56 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

undecided ; but that it was in no way dependent upon 
external circumstances is established by this undeniable 
fact, — that every branch of the Low German stock, from 
whence the Anglo-Saxon sprang, displays the same simpli- 
fication of its grammar. In all these languages there 
has been a constant tendency to relieve themselves of 
that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for every 
shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinc- 
tions, and detect as it were a royal road to the inter- 
change of opinion." 

The assumption here proceeded upon with regard to 
the simplification of their grammatical structure under- 
gone by all the languages of the Low Germanic stock 
has been extended by more recent writers to the Scan- 
dinavian languages of Denmark and Sweden; so that, 
whether the English is to be regarded as belonging ex- 
clusively to the Low Germanic or partially to the Scan- 
dinavian stock, its transition from an inflected to a 
comparatively uninflected condition would be accounted 
for upon this theory by a tendency probably inherent in 
its constitution. 

Mr Guest, making no distinction here between what 
are commonly called the stages of Semi-Saxon and of Old 
or Early English, offers the following explanation of the 
way in which he conceives the transformation of the lan- 
guage to have been brought about (Eng. Rhythms, ii. 105, 
&c): — "The causes which in the twelfth century gave 
birth to the Old English worked nearly at the same time 
a like change in all the kindred dialects, save the most 
northerly, which, safe from their influence amid the 
snows of Iceland and of Sweden, long retained (and in- 
deed still retain) many of the earliest features of our 
language. . . A difference is always to be found between 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 57 

the written and the spoken language of a people. The 
look, the tone, the action, are means of expression which 
the speaker may employ, and the writer cannot ; to 
make himself understood, the latter must use language 
more precise and definite than the former. There is also 
another reason for this difference. When a language 
has no written literature, it is ever subject to a change 
of pronunciation ; and so determinate is the direction of 
these changes, that it may be marked out between limits 
much narrower than any one has yet ventured to lay 
down. But with a written literature a new element 
enters into the calculation. A standard for composition 
now exists, which the writer will naturally prefer to the 
varying dialect of the people, and, as far as he safely 
may, will do his best to follow. In this way the written 
and the spoken languages will act and react upon each 
other ; and it must depend upon the value of the litera- 
ture and the reading habits of the people, which of them 
shall at last prevail. . . The language of our earlier litera- 
ture fell at last a victim, not to the Norman Conquest, 
for it survived that event at least a century — not to the 
foreign jargon which the weak but well-meaning Edward 
first brought into the country, for French did not mix 
with our language till the days of Chaucer ; — it fell before 
the same deep and mighty influences which swept every 
living language from the literature of Europe. When 
the South regained its ascendancy, and Rome once more 
seized the wealth of vassal provinces, its iavourite priests 
had neither the knowledge requisite to understand, nor 
tastes fitted to enjoy, the literature of the countries 
into which they were promoted. The road to their favour 
and their patronage lay elsewhere ; and the monk giving 
up his mother tongue as worthless, began to pride himself 
only upon his Latinity. The legends of his patron saint 



58 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF 

he Latinized, the story of his monastery he Latinized ; in 
Latin he wrote history, in Latin he wrote satires and ro- 
mances. Amid these labours he had little time to study 
the niceties of Anglo-Saxon grammar ; and the Homilies, 
the English Scriptures, Caedmon's paraphrase, the na- 
tional songs, the magnificent Judith, and other treasures 
of native genius, must soon have lain on the shelves of his 
cloister as little read, or, if read, almost as little under- 
stood, as if they had been written in a foreign tongue. 
When he addressed himself to the unlearned, noble or 
ignoble, he used the vulgar dialect of his shire, with its 
idioms, which the written dialect had probably rejected as 
wanting in precision, and with its corrupt pronunciation, 
which alone would require new forms of grammar. In 
this way many specimens of our old English dialects have 
been handed down to us ; and these, however widely they 
differ from each other, agree in one particular, — in con- 
founding the characteristic endings of the Anglo-Saxon." 

This last statement is explained by a preceding para- 
graph : — " The Anglo-Saxons had three vowel-endings, a, 
e, and u, to distinguish the cases of the noun and the dif- 
ferent conjugations of the verb. In the Old English all 
these vowel- endings were represented by the final e ; and 
the loss of the final e is the characteristic mark of our 
modern dialect. It is obvious that either of these changes 
must have brought with it a new language. The confu- 
sion of the vowels, or the loss of the final e, was a con- 
founding of tense and person, of case and number ; in 
short, of those grammatical forms to which language owes 
its precision and its clearness. Other forms were to be 
sought for, before our tongue could again serve the pur- 
poses of science or of literature." 

Mr Guest's solution of the case would, therefore, ap- 
pear to be, that what brought about the corruption of the 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 59 

classic Original English (or Saxon) was simply the neglect 
of that language on the part of the Bomish Churchmen, 
and the preference they were led to give, for literary pur- 
poses, to the Latin. But how was it that this cause did 
not begin to operate till the twelfth century ? In Eng- 
land, as elsewhere, Latin had been the professional lan- 
guage of the clergy from the first introduction of Christi- 
anity, and had been all along the language in which they 
usually wrote : witness Beda, JNennius, Asser, and others 
who lived before the Conquest. Why did not the cor- 
ruption of the regular into the irregular English, if this 
was the sole cause of it, take place in the eighth or ninth 
century ? 

We venture to think that our recent philology has 
gone much too far in denying all connexion between the 
breaking up of the inflectional system of the native lan- 
guage and the Norman Conquest. The view which 
formerly prevailed was erroneous in regard to the modus 
operandi, or manner in which it was supposed that the 
effect was produced; it may be admitted that it was 
not by the Conquest letting in a new language to de- 
stroy the purity of the old one by intermixing with 
it, or to drench it and dissolve its cohesion like an 
inundation. But that it was really this great political 
and social revolution which occasioned, though in an- 
other way, the extinction, or disuse as a living tongue, 
of the ancient language of the country in the form in 
which we have it preserved in the literary works and 
other writings that have come down to us from the 
times before the Conquest, seems too evident to admit 
of being seriously questioned. The facts are only to be 
explained upon that assumption. There is no similarity 
between this case and that of the other Germanic and 
Scandinavian languages which are asserted to have passed 



60 OUTLINES OP THE HISTORY OE 

from a highly inflected to a comparatively uninfected 
state ; even if it could be admitted to have been clearly 
shown that the dissolution or derangement of the original 
inflectional structure of the other Low Germanic and 
Scandinavian tongues which have been referred to had 
been always a purely spontaneous process. The peculi- 
arity of the case of the English is, that it had been highly 
cultivated and largely employed as a literary language. 
It may be safely aflirmed that no instance can be produced 
of a language so circumstanced which can be shown to 
have undergone anything like the same complete and 
rapid disintegration or metamorphosis except under the 
operation of external causes. Although the principle of 
change is continually at work in language, as in everything 
else that is not absolutely dead (as if movement and life 
were one), its action is always extremely gradual and slow 
where it has to contend with the conservative force of a 
living literature. The Latin language preserved its gram- 
matical structure in complete integrity so long as it con- 
tinued to be employed as the literary language of the "West ; 
the Greek did the same for a thousand years longer, 
while it occupied a similar position in the East ; and there 
seems to be no reason for thinking that either might not 
have done so to the present day. It was evidently only 
the overthrow of the Western Eoman empire and of 
western civilisation that occasioned the extinction of the 
old grammatical Latin as a living language ; and the 
destruction of the Christian civilisation of the East when 
Constantinople was conquered and taken possession of by 
the Turks that brought the old Greek in like manner to 
an end. The stream of the Latin literature, in the one 
case, after having flowed on for some eight centuries from 
the date of Livius Andronicus and Naevius and Eabius 
Pictor, ceased with Boethius and Cassiodorus; that of 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 61 

the Greek, in the other, was as suddenly arrested after an 
existence three times as long. And, in both cases, with 
the literature the literary language expired. Precisely 
in the same circumstances and in the same way the old 
grammatical English appears to have passed out of exist- 
ence or use. The Conquest of England by the Normans over- 
threw the peculiar civilisation of which it was at once the 
creation and the exponent, and the entire social system and 
condition of things to which it addressed itself and by 
which it was fed and sustained ; after the Conquest there 
was no demand for any literature written in the old 
language, or any public to read it, any more than there 
remained any public in Italy after the middle of the sixth 
century sufficiently educated to appreciate works written 
in good Latin and to stimulate their production, or any 
educated and wealthy Greek public in Eastern Europe 
after the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks. In 
all the three cases we have exactly the same sequence of 
events, the same chain of causes and consequences : — 
first, the overthrow of the old social system ; next, the 
cessation of the literature, which was part and parcel of 
the abolished condition of society and of civilisation ; 
lastly, the breaking up of the language, which had hitherto 
been preserved from that fate only by its constant em- 
ployment in literature. If even so slightly inflected a 
language as our present English were to cease to be 
written and to be read, how long would it continue to be 
correctly spoken ? Hardly for a generation probably. 

" The birth of a new language," M. Bunsen well ob- 
serves, "presupposes the death of an old one. No language 
dies without a great crisis occurring in the tribe or nation 
which speaks it. This crisis may be a great physical 
revolution, or a voluntary change of country by emigra- 



62 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF 

tion, or a dissolution of the ancient form of political 
society by external human force, by invasion, conquest, 
subjugation. A new language and a new nation are so 
far identical, that a new language cannot originate with- 
out the dissolution of an ancient nationality " (Christianity 
and Mankind, iv. 93). 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 63 



XTV. In reference to the progress of the vernacular 
language, the space from about the middle of the 
Eleventh to the middle of the Thirteenth century, 
or the first two centuries after the Conquest, is 
commonly designated the Period of Semi-Saxon. 
In the popular dialect of this period we have a 
work of considerable length in verse, the Chronicle 
of Layamon. 

Latamon's work has been edited by Sir Frederic 
Madden, under the title of " Layamon's Brut, or Chro- 
nicle of Britain ; a poetical Semi-Saxon Paraphrase of 
the Brut of Wace," with a literal translation, notes, and 
a glossary, in 3 vols, royal 8vo, London, 1847. "Wace 
was a Norman poet, whose metrical chronicle of Britain, 
called Brut d? Angleterre, was written about the middle of 
the twelfth century. Layamon, who calls himself a priest 
of Ernleye upon Severn, that is, of Areley-Kegis, near 
Stourport, in Worcestershire (as first pointed out by Mr 
Guest in Penny Cyclopaedia, xx. 488), otherwise called 
Lower Areley, appears to have written in the latter part of 
the same century, or in the first half of the second century 
after the Conquest. Sir Frederic Madden thinks that his 
work, which extends to above fourteen thousand long 
verses (divided by Sir Frederic into double that number 
of hemistichs), was probably completed about a.d. 1200. 
The views that have been taken of his language, even by 
the most competent among recent authorities, are not 



GJs OUTLINES OF THE HISTOBY OE 

altogether accordant. Mr Price {Preface to Warton, 
109), commenting upon a remark of Mr Mitford (in his 
Harmony of Language), that it "displays all the appearance 
of a language thrown into confusion by the circumstances 
of those who spoke it," affirms that, so far from this being 
the case, " nearly every important form of Anglo-Saxon 
grammar is rigidly adhered to ; and so little was the 
language altered at this advanced period of Norman in- 
fluence, that a few slight alterations might convert it into 
genuine Anglo-Saxon." Mr G-uest (PJng. Rhythms, ii. 
Ill, &c), having observed that one of the most striking 
peculiarities of Layamon's language is its nunnation (from 
Nun, the name of the letter n in Hebrew), proceeds, — 
" Many words end in n, which are strangers to that letter, 
not only in the Anglo-Saxon, but in all the later dialects 
of our language; and, as this letter assists in the de- 
clension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs, the 
grammar of this dialect becomes, to a singular degree, 
complicated and difficult." Afterwards (p. 186) he says : 
" Layamon seems to have halted between two languages, 
the written and the spoken. Now he gives us what 
appears to be the Old English dialect of the west ; and, a 
few sentences further, we find ourselves entangled in all 
the peculiarities of the Anglo-Saxon." In the Penny 
Cyclopcedia (xx. -488) he remarks that Layamon most 
probably used the dialect of "Worcestershire, the part of 
the country in which he lived. His English, or Saxon, 
at any rate, is clearly southern as opposed to northern, 
and western as opposed to eastern. 

Sir Frederic Madden (Pref xxv.) also holds that the 
dialect of Layamon's poem must be taken to be that of 
North "Worcestershire, the district in which the writer 
lived. Although this locality was within the bounds of 
what was called the kingdom of Mercia, the dialect, he 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 65 

observes, is decidedly that of the west, which was sub- 
stantially the same with that of the south, of England. 
He thinks there can be no doubt that the written lan- 
guage of the country, previous to the Conquest, was 
more stable in its character and more observant of gram- 
matical accuracy than the spoken; and that there are 
many reasons to induce us to believe that the spoken 
language in the reign of Edward the Confessor did not 
materially differ from that which is found in manuscripts 
a century later (Pref. xxvii.). " The language of Laya- 
mon," he then goes on, " belongs to that transition period 
in which the groundwork of Anglo-Saxon phraseology 
and grammar still existed, although gradually yielding 
to the influence of the popular forms of speech. We 
find in it, as in the later portion of the Saxon Chronicle, 
marked indications of a tendency to adopt those termina- 
tions and sounds which characterise a language in a state 
of change, and which are apparent also in some other 
branches of the Teutonic tongue." The peculiarities 
distinguishing it from the pure Anglo-Saxon he enumer- 
ates as being : — " The use of a as an article ; — the change 
of the Anglo-Saxon, or classic English of the earliest form, 
terminations a and an into e and en, as well as the disre- 
gard of inflections and genders; — the masculine forms 
given to neuter nouns in the plural ; — the neglect of the 
feminine terminations of adjectives and pronouns, and 
confusion between the definite and indefinite declensions ; 
— the introduction of the preposition to before infinitives, 
and occasional use of weak tenses of verbs and participles 
instead of strong ; — the constant occurrence of en for on 
m the plurals of verbs, and frequent elision of the final 
e; — together with the uncertainty of the rule for the 
government of prepositions." There are also, it is added, 



66 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

numerous vowel-changes, which, however, are not alto- 
gether arbitrary. 

The nunnation in which Layamon indulges, or his 
" addition of a final n to certain cases of nouns and ad- 
jectives, to some tenses of verbs, and to several other 
parts of speech," is characterised by his editor as being 
by no means uniform or constant, and as in numerous 
instances of final rhyme possibly used only for the sake 
of euphony, that is, of supplying the requisite conso- 
nance. Its use, Sir Frederic thinks, was probably re- 
stricted to the dialect in which the poem is written. 
"We have the poem in two texts, both apparently of the 
thirteenth century, but one probably a little later than 
the other. There is less of nunnation in the later text. 
And even in the earlier, we are told, " there are many 
passages in which it has been struck out or erased by a 
second hand, and sometimes by the first ; so that it is 
manifest that some doubt must have existed as to the 
propriety of its usage." 

The distinguishing marks of the western dialect in 
Layamon are enumerated by Sir Frederic as being chiefly 
" the termination of the present tense plural in th, and 
infinitives in i, ie, or y ; the forms of the plural personal 
pronouns, heo, heore, Tieom; the frequent occurrence of 
the prefix * before past participles ; the use of v for/, and 
prevalence of the vowel u for i or y, in such words as dude, 
hudde, kulle, putte, hure, &c." In the later text he con- 
ceives an Anglian or northern element to have probably 
been infused into the dialect. This text he thinks may per- 
haps have been written on the east side of Leicestershire. 

" The structure of Layamon's poem," says Sir Frederic, 
" consists partly of lines in which the alliterative system of 
the Anglo-Saxons is preserved, and partly of couplets of 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 67 

unequal length rhiming together. Many couplets, indeed, 
occur which have both of these forms, whilst others are 
often met with which possess neither. The latter there- 
fore must have depended wholly on accentuation, or have 
been corrupted in transcription. The relative proportion 
of each of these forms is not to be ascertained without 
extreme difficulty, since the author uses them everywhere 
intermixed, and slides from alliteration to rhime, or from 
rhime to alliteration, in a manner perfectly arbitrary. 
The alliterative portion, however, predominates on the 
whole greatly over the lines rhiming together, even in- 
cluding the imperfect or assonant terminations, which are 
very frequent." And he refers to the fullest and most 
learned discussion which the subject has received, that by 
Mr G-uest, who, in his History of English Rhythms, n. 
114 — 124, gives a long specimen of the poem with the 
accents marked, both of the alliterative and rhiming coup- 
lets, and shows that the latter " are founded on the models 
of accentuated Anglo-Saxon rhythms of four, five, six, or 
seven accents," those of six and of five accents being used 
most frequently.* 

* "An Anglo-Saxon verse," says Mr Guest (Pen. Cycl. xx. 489, art. 
Saxon Language and Literature), "is made up of two sections, which 
together may contain four, five, six, or even more accented syllables. 
These sections are bound together by the law of alliteration, or, in 
other words, each verse must have at least two accented syllables (one 
in each section) beginning with the same consonant or with vowels." 
But he adds . — " It is very incorrect to call this alliteration the 
' essence ' or the ' groundwork' of Anglo-Saxon verse. It is certainly 
an important part, but still a mere adjunct. The purposes it served 
were similar to those which are provided for by the final rhyme of our 
modern versification. The essence of Anglo-Saxon verse consisted in 
its system of rhythm." 

f 2 



OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 



XV. After the middle of the Thirteenth century, the 
language assumes the general shape and physi- 
ognomy of the English which we now write and 
speak. It may be called English rough-hewn. 
The space from about the middle of the Thirteenth 
to the middle of the Fourteenth century is usually 
designated the Period of Old or (better) Early 
English. 

Another work in verse is commonly mentioned along 
with Layamon's Chronicle as of the same age; that 
known as the Ormulum, from its author, who calls him- 
self Ormin or Orm. Considerable extracts from the 
Ormulum had been given by Hickes and "Wanley, and 
in Mr Ghiest's and other modern works ; but the whole 
has now been printed.* Hickes goes so far as to 
place it among the first writings after the Conquest. 
Tyrwhitt, who, in his Essay on the Language and Versi- 
fication of Chaucer, was the first to point out that it was 
written in verse, only ventures to say that he cannot 
conceive it to be of earlier date than the reign of Henry 
the Second (or the latter half of the twelfth century). 
Mr Guest, who, although he seems in one place {Eng. 
Rhythms, i. 107) to speak of Ormin as having written 
in the beginning of the thirteenth century, elsewhere (ii. 

* "Edited from the original Manuscript in the Bodleian, with 
Notes and a Glossary, hy Robert Meadows White, D.D., formerly 
Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford ; " 2 vols. 8vo, 
Oxford, 1852. (At the University Press.) 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. b9 

185) assigns his poem to the latter half of the twelfth, 
considers it " the oldest, the purest, and by far the most 
valuable specimen of our Old English dialect that time 
has left us." He adds : — " Ormin used the dialect of his 
day ; and, when he wanted precision or uniformity, he fol- 
lowed out the principles on which that dialect rested. 
Were we thoroughly masters of his grammar and vocabu- 
lary, we might hope to explain many of the difficulties in 
which blunders of transcription and a transitional state of 
the language have involved the syntax and the prosody of 
Chaucer." {Ibid!) Afterwards (ii. 209), he intimates 
that, if he were called upon to say in what part of Eng- 
land a dialect such as Ormin's was ever spoken, he would 
fix upon some county north of Thames and south of 
Lincolnshire. 

The Ormulum consists of a series of metrical homilies 
and passages from Scripture read in the service of the 
Church. "What we have appears to be only a portion of 
the work ; but it extends to about 20,000 lines, two of 
which, however, may be considered as making only one 
line in another kind of measure. Ormin has given a re- 
markable appearance to his language by a spelling pecu- 
liar to himself, which seems to consist in always doubling 
the consonant after a vowel having any other than the 
sound that would be given to it by a single consonant 
followed by a silent e. He attaches great importance to 
this device, expressly charging all who may copy his book 
to write the letters twice wherever he has himself done 
so, and assuring them that otherwise they will not write 
the word aright. The effect will be seen in the following 
short specimen : — 

"Godd seggde thuss till Abraham; Tacc Ysaac thin wennchell, 
And snith itt, alls itt waere an shep, And legg itt upponn allterr, 
And brenn itt all till asskess thaer, And offre itt me to lake. 



70 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

And Abraham wass forrtb.rib.lit bun To don Dribbtiness wille, 
And toe hiss sune sone anan, And band itt fet and bande, 
And leggde itt upponn allterr swa, And drob biss swerd off shaetbe, 
And bof tbe swerd upp withth biss bannd To smitenn itt to daede ; 
Forr thatt he wollde ben till Godd Herrsumm onn alle wise. 
And Godd sahh thatt be wollde slaen The child withth swerdess 

egge, 
And seggde thuss till Habraham, Thatt witt tu wel to sothe, 
Hald, Abraham, hald upp thin hannd, ~Ne sla thu nohht tin wenn- 

chell; 
Nu wat I thatt tu drsedesst Godd, And lufesst Godd withth herrte ; 
Tacc thaer an shep bafftenn thin bacc, And offre itt forr the wennchell. 
And Abraham tha snath thatt shep, And lett biss sune libbenn ; 
Forr thatt he wollde ben till Godd Hersumm onn alle wise." 

v. 14,664— 14,69a 

That is, in our present English : — 

God said thus to Abraham :— Take Isaac, thine little-child, 
And slay it as it were an sheep, and lay it upon [the] altar, 
And burn it all to ashes there, and offer it me for gift. 
And Abraham was forthwith bound [engaged in proceeding] to do 

[the] Lord's will, 
And took his son soon anon, and bound him foot and hand,* 
And laid it upon [the] altar so, and drew his sword [out] of sheath, 
And heaved tbe sword up with his hand to smite it to death ; 
For that he would be to God obedient in all wise. 
And God saw that he would [was willing to] slay the child with 

sword's edge, 
And said thus to Abraham (that wot thou well for sooth) ; 
Hold, Abraham, hold up thine hand, nor slay thou not thine little- 
child; 
Now know I that thou dreadest God, and lovest God with heart , 
Take there an sheep behind thine back, and offer it for thine little- 
child. 
And Abraham then slew the sheep, and let his son live ; 
For that he would be to God obedient in all wise. 



* Mr Guest translates "feet and hands," understanding the e in 
hande to be the sign of the plural. See post, under Sect. xii. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 71 

It is impossible to compare Layamon and the Orrnulum 
without being led to entertain the strongest doubts as to 
the correctness of the common assumption that they are 
works of the same age. They do not exhibit the lan- 
guage in the same stage, or, at least, in the same state. 
The grammar of Layamon is half, or more than half, 
that of what is called Saxon, or the English of the 
time before the Conquest ; it may be questioned if that 
of the Orrnulum have retained a vestige of what is peculiar 
to that form of the language. If it were certain that the 
two works were of the same age, we should be compelled 
to conclude that the people of the west were still speak- 
ing English of the first form while those of the eastern 
counties were speaking English of the second form. But, 
in truth, there is no evidence whatever that the two works 
are of the same age. The Orrnulum, like many other 
pieces which have been assigned to the twelfth century, 
is much more probably of the latter part of the thir- 
teenth.* In that case, Layamon and it will belong, ac- 
cording to the arrangement here adopted, to different 
periods in the history of the language. 

Ormin's peculiar spelling may probably have preserved 
something of the history of the language. If it was his 

* "It may be proper to observe here," says Price, in a note on the 
First Section of Warton's History, — in which several of these pieces 
are brought forward, although the Orrnulum is not mentioned, — " that 
the dates assigned to the several compositions quoted in this Section 
are extremely arbitrary and uncertain. Judging from internal evi- 
dence — a far more satisfactory criterion than Warton's computed age 
of his MSS. — there is not one which may not safely be referred to the 
thirteenth century, and by far the greater number to the close of that 
period." Many important additional remarks upon these compositions 
will be found in the Notes to the Second Edition of Price's Warton (3 
vols. 8vo, 1840), vol. i. pp. 1—42. 



72 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF 

rule always to leave the consonant single after the long 
or name sound (as in mate, meet, mite, mote, mute), and 
to double it after every vowel otherwise sounded, then 
from the short passage which has been quoted above we 
should learn that, while God, thus, till, up, will, his, off, 
wit, for, edge, back, it, Ms, with, on, that,\rere all pronounced 
in his day, as at present, with the shut sound, thine, sheep, 
smite (or smiten), child, took, as they now do, the name 
sound ; that the e in legg (lay) and in the first syllable 
of seggde (said?) was sounded as in our egg ; that snith 
and snath rhymed not to our lith and lath, but to our 
lithe and lathe ; that bun was probably pronounced boon, 
and don, doon or dun ; that toe was called took, and the 
first syllable of sothe, sooth, as at present; that hof^as 
probably sounded hofe, or hove ; that they probably said, 
not luffest or lovest (as we do), but loofest or loovest ; 
that an was sounded ain (as in bane) ; that heart was 
called hert (not heerf) ; and that, on the other hand, the 
word for a sword was pronounced not swerd, but sweerd. 
And, however, which is usually indicated in the MS. 
by a contraction, was probably pronounced as at pre- 
sent. 

What is commonly given as our earliest specimen of 
English (as distinguished from what is called Semi- Saxon) 
is a proclamation issued in 1258, in the name of King 
Henry III., while under the control of the Council ap- 
pointed at what is called "the mad parliament" of 
Oxford, of which the following is the copy addressed to 
the people of Huntingdonshire : — 

" Henr' thurg godes fultume King on Engleneloande 
Lhoauerd on Yrloand Duk on ^Nbrm' on Aquitain' and 
Eorl on Aniow, send igretinge to alle hise halde, ilaerde 
and ilaewed, on Huntendon' schir' 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 73 

" Thaet witen ge wel alle thaet we willen and vnnen 
thaet, thaet ure raedesmen alle other the moare dael of 
heom thaet beoth ichosen thurg us and thurg thaet loandes 
folk one vre kuneriche habbeth idon and schullen don in 
the worthnesse of gode, and on vre treowthe for the freme 
of the loande thurg the besigte of than to foreniseide 
redesmen beo stedefaest and ilestinde in alle thinge 
abuten aende 

" And we hoaten alle vre treowe in the treowthe thaet 
heo vs ogen thaet heo stedefaesliche healden and swerien 
to healden and to werien the isetnesses thet beon imakede 
and beon to makien thurg than to foren iseide raedesmen 
other thurg the moare dael of heom alswo alse hit is 
biforen iseid. 

" And thaet aehc other helpe thaet for to done bi than 
ilche othe agenes alle men rigt for to done and to foangen. 
and non ne mine of loand ne of egtewherthurg this 
besigte muge beon ilet other iwersed on onie wise. And 
gif oni other onie cumen her ongenes we willen and 
hoaten thaet alle vre treowe heom healden deadlicheistan. 

" And for thaet we willen thaet this beo stedefaest and 
lestinde We senden gew this writ open iseined with 
vre seel to halden amanges gew ine hord. "Witnesse 
usselvien aet Lunden', thane egtetenthe day on the 
monthe of Octobr' in the two and fowertighte yeare of 
vre cruninge." 

Henry, through God's help, King in England, Lord in Ireland, Duke 
in Normandy, in Aquitain, and Earl in Anjou, sends greeting to all his 
subjects, learned and lay, in Huntingdonshire. 

This know ye well all that we will and grant that that our counsel- 
lors, all or the more part of them, that be chosen through us and 
through the land's folk in our kingdom, have done and shall do, in the 
honour of God and in our truth [allegiance], for the good of the land, 
ttirough the business [act] of those to-foresaid counsellors, be steadfast 
and lasting in all things but [without] end. 



74 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF 

And we enjoin all our lieges, in the truth [allegiance] that they us 
owe, that they steadfastly hold, and swear to hold and to defend, the 
ordinances that be made and be to make through the to-foresaid 
counsellors, or through the more part of them, all so as it is before 
said. 

And that each other help that for to do, by them [to] each other 
against all men right for to do and to promote. And none, nor of my 
land nor elsewhere, through this business may be let [hindered] or 
damaged in any wise. And if any man or any woman come them 
against, we will and enjoin that all our lieges them hold deadly foes. 

And, for that we will that this be steadfast and lasting, we send you 
this writ open, signed with our seal, to hold amongst you in hoard 
[store]. Witness ourselves at London, this eighteenth day in the 
month of October, in the two and fortieth year of our crowning.* 

But this official paper can scarcely be safely quoted as 
exhibiting the current language of the time. Like all 
such documents, it is made up in great part of established 
phrases of form, many of which had probably become ob- 
solete in ordinary speech and writing. The English of 
the proclamation of 1258 is much less modern than that 
of the Ormulum, and fully as near to the earlier form of 

* This proclamation was first printed by Somner, in his Dictiona- 
rium Saxonico- Latino- Anglicum, fol. Oxon. 1659. In the Record 
Commission edition of Rymer's Fasdera, vol. i. (1816), p. 378, it is 
entitled, " Carta Eegis in idiomate Anglico, ad singulos comitatus 
Angliae et Hiberniae super reformatione status regni per proceres 
ejusdem regni ; " and is stated to be there given as transcribed from 
the original among the Patent Rolls in the Tower of London (" Pat. 
43, Hen. III. m. 15, in Turr. Lond."). The present transcript, how- 
ever, will be found, we believe, to be more correct than any hitherto 
published. 

" This proclamation," Dr Lingard observes, " is in both languages 
[English and French], the first of that description which has been pre- 
served since the reign of Henry I., though I do not understand how 
such proclamations could have become known to the people unless they 
were published in the English language." Hist. Eng. III. 125. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 75 

the language, both in the words and in the grammar, as 
any part of LayamorCs Chronicle, if not rather more so. 

Exclusive of the Ormulum, the two principal literary 
works belonging to this period (commonly known as that 
of Early English) are the metrical Chronicles of Robert 
of Gloucester and Robert of Brunne. 

The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester was edited by 
Thomas Hearne in 1724. The writer may be considered 
as belonging to the first half of the present period : it 
has been shown by Sir Frederic Madden (Introd. to 
Hacelok, Hi.) that he must have survived the year 1297. 
The following passage is doubly curious in reference to 
the history of the language : — 

" Thus come lo ! Engelond into Normannes honde, 
And the Normans ne couthe speke tho bote her owe speche, 
And speke French as dude atom, and here chyldren dude al so teche ; 
So that heymen of thys lond, that of her blod come, 
Holdeth alle thulke speche that hii of hem nome ; 
Vor bote a man couthe French me tolth of hym wel lute : 
Ac lowe men holdeth to Englyss and to her kunde speche yute. 
Ich wene ther ne be man in world contreyes none 
That ne holdeth to her kunde speche, bote Engelond one. 
Ac wel me wot vor to conne both wel yt ys ; 
Vor the more that a man con, the more worth he ys." * 

That is, in modern words : — Thus came lo ! England 
into Normans' hand. And the Normans no could speak 
then but their own speech, and spake French as [they] 
did at home, and their children did all so teach ; so that 
high-men of this land, that of their blood come, hold all 
the same speech that they of them took ; for but a man 
know Erench one [homme, or on] telleth [reckoneth] of 

* Hearne, 364; Harl.MS. 201, fol. 127, r°. 



76 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOEY OE 

him well little [lien peu] : but low men hold to English 
and to their natural speech yet. I ween there no be man 
in world countries none that no holdeth to their natural 
speech, but England [al-]one. But well I wot for to 
know both well it is ; for the more that a man know, the 
more worth he is. 

Some of the peculiarities in the language of Eobert of 
Gloucester are probably to be attributed to the dialect he 
uses being that of the west of England. Robert ofBrunne, 
that is, Bourne, in Lincolnshire, may be assumed to have 
written in that of the east country. His proper name 
appears to have been Eobert Manning ; and he may be 
placed nearly half a century later than Eobert of Glouces- 
ter. His Chronicle is stated to have been finished in the 
year 1338. It consists of two parts ; the first of which 
is in octo-syllabic rhyme, and is a translation from "Wace's 
Brut, the same original upon which Layamon worked ; 
the second is in Alexandrine verse, and is translated from 
a French chronicle recently written by an Englishman, 
Piers or Peter de Langtoft, a canon regular of St. Austin, 
at Bridlington in Yorkshire. Only the second part has 
been printed : it was edited by Hearne in 1725. 

Eobert de Brunne distinctly claims to be considered 
as writing in English; and he is perhaps the earliest 
writer after the Conquest who uniformly and pointedly 
gives that name to his language. 

The following passages are from the Prologue to the 
First Part of the Chronicle, which Hearne has printed in 
the Preface to his edition of the Second Part : — 

" Lordynges [Lords'} that be now here, 
If ye mile listene and lere [learn] 
All the story of Inglande, 
Als [as] Robert Mannyng wry ten it fand [written it found], 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 77 

And on [in] Inglysch has it schewed, 

Not for the lered [learned], bot for the lewed [unlearned] ; 

For tho [those] that on this lond wonn [dwell] 

That the Latin ne Frankys conn [Latin nor French know], 

For to haf solace and gamen [game, enjoyment] 

In felauschip when thai [they] sitt samen [together]. 



After the Bretons the Inglis camen ; 

The lordschip of this lande thai namen [took] ; 

South and north, west and est, 

That calle men now the Inglis gest [history ?] 

When thai first among the Bretons, 

That now ere [are] Inglis, than [then] were Saxons, 

Saxons, Inglis, hight alle oliche [were called all alike]. 

I mad noght for no disours [diseurs, professed tale-tellers], 

Ne [?ior] for no seggers [sayers, reciters] no [nor] harpours, 

But for the luf [love] of symple men, 

That strange Inglis can not ken [know, icnderstand] ; 

For many it ere [there are] that strange Inglis 

In rynie wate [wot, know] neuer what it is. 



Of Brunne I am, if any me blame ; 

Eobert Mannyng is my name : 

Blissed be he of God of heuene [heaven], 

That me Robert with gude wille neuene [named] . 

In the thrid Edwarde's tyme was I 

When I wrote alle this story. 

In the hous of Sixille I was a throwe [while] ; 

Dans [Dominus] Robert of Maltone, that ye know 

Did [caused] it write for felawes [brother monks'] sake, 

When thai wild solace make." 



78 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF 



XVI. Meanwhile, in the literature of the country, and 
also in the oral intercourse of the most influential 
classes of the population, the native language may 
be said to have been for the First century after the 
Norman Conquest completely overborne by the 
French ; for the Second, to have been in a state of 
revolt against that foreign tongue; during the 
Third, to have been rapidly making head against it 
and regaining its old supremacy. 

Ob the three stages may be thus distinguished : — The 
first, comprehending the reigns of the Conqueror, his two 
sons, and Stephen, a space of 88 years ; the second, the 
reigns of Henry II., his two sons, and Henry III., a space 
of 118 years ; the third, the reigns of Edward I., II., and 
III., a space of 105 years.* In a loose or general sense the 
first and second of these spaces will correspond to what 
has been designated the Period of Semi-Saxon, the third 
to what is commonly called the Period of Early English. 

What professes to be our earliest notice of the intro- 
duction of the French tongue into England, and of the 
extent to which it speedily came to be used, is found in 

* The reign of William I. (the Conqueror) began in 1066 ; that of 
his son, William II. (Rufus), in 1087 ; that of his brother, Henry I., 
in 1100 ; that of Stephen in 1135 ; that of Henry II. in 1154 ; that 
of his son, Richard I. (Cccur de Lion), in 1189 ; that of his brother, 
John, in 1199 ; that of his son, Henry III., in 1216 ; that of his son, 
Edward I., in 1272 ; that of his son, Edward II., in 1307 ; that of his 
son, Edward III., in 1327 ; and he reigned till 1377, or 311 years from 
the Conquest. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 79 

the work styled the History of the Abbey of Croyland 
by Ingulphus {Ingulfi Croylandensis Historic/). Ingul- 
phus was abbot of the monastery of Croyland, or Crow- 
land, in Lincolnshire, from a.d. 1075 till 1109, when he 
died at the age of eighty. He was, therefore, at the time 
of the Norman Conquest, a man of between thirty and 
forty. But the History which bears his name is now 
generally regarded as being to a great extent a forgery of 
a later age, most probably of the beginning of the four- 
teenth or the end of the thirteenth century. It may, 
however, have been founded in part upon traditions or 
even documents of earlier origin. The amount of what 
it states upon the present subject is : — That even before 
the Conquest, in the reign of the Confessor, all the English 
nobility, following the fashion of the king, himself a 
Norman in all his habits and feelings, and of the other 
Normans with whom he had filled the highest offices in 
the kingdom, began both to speak French and to have 
their charters and other writings drawn up in that 
language ; and that, after the Conquest, not only were 
the laws and statutes of the realm promulgated in French, 
but that language was substituted for English in teaching 
boys at school the elements of grammar. The fact, how- 
ever, is, as has been already stated, that the laws were 
published in Latin for more than two centuries after the 
Conquest. If they were ever also published in French, 
which is doubtful, and can hardly have been the case ex- 
cept in a few instances, the French was apparently a 
translation from the Latin.* 

* This, at any rate, was probably the case with what are called the 
Laws of the Conqueror, which are given by Ingulphus in French (See 
Sir Francis Palgrave's Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth, 
pp. 55 et seg., and his Proofs and Illustrations, pp. Ixxxviii — civ., con- 
taining the Latin text, published for the first time from the Holkham 



80 OUTLINES OE THE HISTOSY OF 

"Warton and Tyrwhitt have collected various testimonies 
which amply confirm what is stated in the Croyland 
History as to the employment of French in the education 
of youth, and the general prevalence of that language in 
England for a long time after the Conquest. It is men- 
tioned by G-ervase of Tilbury, a writer of the early part 
of the thirteenth century, that in his time the English 
nobility always sent their children to be brought up in 
Erance. The statements of Robert of Gloucester at the 
close of that century, and of Eobert Holcot in the begin- 
ning and Ealph Higden about the middle of the next, have 
been already referred to. 

It is also known, not only from the recorded names 
and accounts of the writers, but from many remains that 
have come down to us, that an abundant production of 
literature in the Erench language was carried on both 
by foreigners resident at the English court and by Eng- 
lishmen for some centuries after the Conquest. In all 
light or popular literature Erench was at first the only 
language employed ; it continued to predominate for some 
time after the English had begun to come into use ; nor, 
even after the latter had acquired the ascendancy, did its 
foreign rival cease to be occasionally resorted to. It is 
evident that Erench must have been more familiar 
than English to a considerable section of the inhabitants 
of England down to the end of the fourteenth century.* 

MS.). An opposite view, however, has been taken by Luders (Tracts, 
pp. 392, 393) of the French text of Magna Charta, first published in 
D'Achery's Spicilegium, which he regards as the original. 

* See, however, what has been advanced by Mr Guest in opposition 
to or in qualification of this view, in his History of English Rhythms, ii. 
427. He conceives that the French, or Romance language as it was 
called, was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries " a dead language, 
learnt only from books; " and, while he allows that it "must have been 



TIIE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 81 

The declension and extinction of the French language 
in England were probably precipitated by the strong 
anti-G-allican feeling engendered by the French wars of 
Edward III., which began a few years before the middle 
of the fourteenth century. 

The discontinuance of French as the medium for the 
instruction of boys in Latin is expressly noted by John 
de Trevisa, in a paragraph which he inserts in his transla- 
tion of Higden's Chronicle after the passage recording 
the fact of the previous usage, to have taken place about 
that date, or, as he puts it, immediately after the first 
great plague, which was in the year 1349. The authors 
of the innovation, he says, were a grammar school-master, 
named John Cornwall, and his pupil, Eichard Pencrich. 
Trevisa writes this account in the year 1385.* 

Meanwhile, in 1362, the 36th year of Edward III., 
it was ordered by act of parliament that all trials at 
law should henceforth be conducted in English. In 
the preamble of the act it is averred that the French 
tongue, in which pleas had heretofore been pleaded, was 
become much unknown in the realm, so that the people 
who impleaded or were impleaded in the king's and other 
courts had no knowledge nor understanding of what was 
said for them or against them by their sergeants and 
other pleaders. 

more or less familiar to the scholar as well as totlie courtier," he holds 
it to be clear that " it did not reach to the great body of the people," 
from "the many versions of Eomance poems made for the lewed man," 
a phrase which, he observes, includes both lord and yeoman. But 
how are we to account for the existence of the Eomance originals of 
those versions, and of a large body of Romance literature besides, 
which we have no reason to believe ever was translated, except upon 
the supposition that the French language was more familiar than the 
English to a large portion of the English reading public ? 
* See it in Appendix. 

G 



82 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOKY OF 

Yet this very statute is in French, as all statutes con- 
tinued to be for more than a century longer. The first 
in English is in the 1st year of Henry VII. (1485) ; and 
even that is also in French. It is only from 1488-9, 
the 4th of Henry VII., that English alone is used. The 
proceedings of the House of Lords were recorded in 
French down to a still later date. Certain parliamentary 
forms, indeed, are still in that language. French also 
continued to be the language in which the published re- 
ports of law cases were usually drawn up till the middle 
of the seventeenth century ; nor did its employment for 
that purpose altogether cease till some time after the 
commencement of the eighteenth. 

By the statute of 1362 pleas were ordered to be always 
entered and enrolled in Latin (instead of sometimes in 
Latin, sometimes in French, as had been heretofore the 
practice). This would seem to show that the statute 
was instigated more by spite against the French language 
than by affection for the English. 



THE ENGLISH LANGTTAGE 83 



XVII. In the course of the contest between the two 
languages the English had undergone a consider- 
able alteration of its vocabulary by the reception 
of words from the French, many of which had pro- 
bably displaced or rendered obsolete equivalent 
terms of native origin ; so that, by the time it had 
come to be fully established and recognised, in the 
latter part of the fourteenth century, as the proper 
literary language of the country, it had been trans- 
formed from a purely Gothic into a partially Neo- 
Latin language. 

The French language in England was only an exotic, 
which, introduced by force, was for a time sustained, and 
even disseminated within certain limits, by the same 
force which had imported it, but could not, in the nature 
of things, continue to maintain an independent existence 
in the country after the originally foreign domination 
with which it was brought in had come to be completely 
nationalised. 

Yet in the same manner, and, perhaps, nearly in the 
same degree, in which the old political constitution of 
the country has been permanently modified by that 
which the Normans established in its stead, has the old 
language been affected and changed by intermixture with 
that of the Normans. 

It may be held to be now admitted on all hands that 
it is only in the vocabulary of the English language that 
any intrusion or direct action of the Erench is to be 

Q 2 



"■' '" -)■■ 



84 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

traced. Such change as the grammar has undergone 
certainly has not been produced by the adoption of any 
part of the grammar of its rival. 

There has been considerable difference of opinion, how- 
ever, in regard to the date at which the partial trans- 
formation of the vocabulary of the English by absorption 
from the French began to show itself. Tyrwhitt refers 
to the writings both of Robert of Brunne and E-obert of 
Gloucester as evidencing that this process had fairly com- 
menced in the thirteenth century ; Mr Guest, neverthe- 
less, as we have seen (see ante, p. 57), has intimated his 
adherence to the old opinion, that " French did not mix 
with our language till the days of Chaucer," or till nearly 
a century after the time of Robert of Gloucester. 

Tyrwhitt asks if it be credible that " a poet writing in 
English [as was Chaucer's case] upon the most familiar 
subjects would stuff his compositions with French words 
and phrases,* if such words and phrases had not been 
generally intelligible to his readers, that is to say, if they 
had not already taken their place in the common or na- 
tional language ? " Or," it is added, " if he had been so 
very absurd, is it conceivable that he should have imme- 
diately become, not only the most admired, but also the 
most popular, writer of his time and country?" 

Chaucer has nowhere evinced any special partiality for 
the French language. He derides (in his description 
of the Prioress in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales) 
the French spoken in England ; and in his prose tract 
entitled The Testament of Love he speaks with contempt 
of such of his countrymen as still continued to " speke 
their poysy mater " in that foreign tongue ; adding, " Let, 
then, clerkes endyten in Latyn, for they have the pro- 
pertye in science and the knowinge in that facultye, and 
lette Frenchmen in their Frenche also endyte their queynt 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 85 

termes, for it is kyndly [natural] to theyr mouthes ; and 
let us shewe our fantasyes in such wordes as we learneden 
of our dames tonge," — that is, what we now call our mother 
tongue, the tongue we learn from our mothers. 

The proportion of words of French derivation in the 
English, not only of Chaucer, but of the generality of 
Chaucer's contemporaries, in that, for instance, of Man- 
devil and "Wiclif, is far too large to be accounted for 
except on the hypothesis that the vocabulary of the one 
language had then been flowing into the other for a con- 
siderable time. 

It is probable that this process had been going on 
almost from the birth of the new form of the English lan- 
guage and of English literature, as distinguished from 
what have been called Saxon and Semi-Saxon, that is to 
say, from the middle of the thirteenth century. It was 
the natural consequence of the relative position of the 
two languages and the two literatures, — the one (the 
English) mainly the offspring and imitator of the other 
(the Erench), and seeking to make itself acceptable to 
the same community the most influential portion of which 
had so long patronised its predecessor. 

The English language, probably, would not have ac- 
quired the ascendancy so soon as it did if it had not thus 
assumed a partially Erench guise or character, and so 
enabled itself the more easily to become a substitute for 
Erench, and to win its way with the most cultivated class 
of readers. 

It was, no doubt, principally through the medium of 
literary compositions that Erench words were at first 
introduced into the English language. Many of the 
earliest works written in English were translations, more 
or less free, from the Erench ; and the translator would 
in many cases have every temptation to retain an ex- 



86 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OE 

pressive term in his original, rather than to beat his 
brains in attempting to find or to fabricate a vernacular 
equivalent. A French word introduced now and then 
would be an impediment to no reader, and would by many 
or most be regarded as rather ornamental. 

At the same time the intrusion of words formed from 
the French was, probably, facilitated by the broken down 
or uncemented condition of the English language at this 
date, which disabled it from producing new terms, when 
wanted, out of his own resources as readily as the primi- 
tive form of the language, with its more inflectional struc- 
ture, might have done. 

The total, or all but total, absence of Latin in the 
Original English (with the exception only of the theolo- 
gical and learned words for which it was indebted to the 
[Roman ecclesiastics) is a remarkable fact, and one of 
great importance ; but rather in reference to the history 
of the country than to that of the language. It is some- 
what strange that few or none even of the words which 
the Gothic conquerors of Britain are supposed to have 
adopted from the Welsh language appear to be of Latin 
original. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 87 



XVIII. Our modern standard English, in so far as it 
is of native origin, appears to have grown out of a 
dialect formed in the Midland Counties by such an 
intermixture of the Northern and Southern dialects 
as rejected the more remarkable peculiarities of both. 

The question of the local origin of standard English 
forms the subject of an interesting disquisition by Mr 
Guest, which will be found in the History of English 
Bhythms, ii. 187—207. 

Mr Guest's view is founded in part upon a passage 
(already referred to) in the Latin Chronicle of Ealph 
Higden, written about or shortly before the middle of 
the fourteenth century, in which, after stating that the 
English had originally among them three different dia- 
lects, — southern, midland, and northern, — -but that, having 
become mixed first with Danes, and afterwards with Nor- 
mans, they had in many respects corrupted their own 
tongue, and now affected a sort of outlandish babble, 
Higden goes on : — " In the above threefold Saxon tongue, 
which has barely survived among a few country people, 
the men of the east agree more in speech with those of 
the west — as being situated under the same quarter of the 
heavens — than the northern men with the southern. 
Hence it is that the Mercians,* or midland English — 

* The name of Mercia, or the March, was given to that one of the 
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which bordered on the "Welsh territory, and 
which in its greatest extent came to include all the middle of England, 
or (with the exception of Wales in the west and East Anglia in the 
east) the whole range of country between the Trent and the Kibble in 
the north, and the Thames and the Bristol Avon in the south. 



88 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

partaking, as it were, the nature of the extremes— under- 
stand the adjoining dialects, the northern and the southern, 
better than those last understand each other. The whole 
speech of the Northumbrians, especially in Yorkshire, is 
so harsh and rude, that we southern men can hardly un- 
derstand it." 

The country of the northern dialect, or dialects, Mr 
Gruest extends as far south as to the Thames. That the 
dialects spoken to the north of that river possessed a com- 
mon character, which long distinguished them from the 
southern dialects, he thinks may be shown even at the 
present day. The inflections of the northern verb, in 
particular, differ from those of the southern : — The pres. 
ind. was, in the southern, Ich hop-e, Thou hop-est, He 
hop-eth, We, Ye,Hihop-eih; in the northern, I hop-es, Thou 
hop-es, He hop-es, We, Ye, Hi hop-es : the second per. sing, 
perf. ind. was, in the southern, Thou hoped-est ; in the 
northern, Thou hoped-es : the second per. sing. pres. imper. 
was, in the southern, Hop-eih ye ; in the northern, Hop- 
es ye : the pres. infin. was, in the southern, To hop-en; in 
the northern, To hope. In the northern inflections, 
Mr Guest holds, we may detect those of a conjugation 
which is fully developed in the Swedish. Then, after 
noticing other peculiarities, he proceeds ; — " It is a curious 
fact that both our universities are situated close to the 
boundary line which separated the northern from the 
southern English : and I cannot help thinking, that the 
jealousies of these two races were consulted in fixing upon 
the sites. The histories of Cambridge and Oxford are 
filled with their feuds ; and more than once has the king's 
authority been interposed, to prevent the northern men 
retiring, and forming within their own limits a university 
at Stamford or Northampton. The union of these two 
races at the university must have favoured the growth of 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 89 

any intermediate dialect ; and to such a dialect the cir- 
cumstances of the country, during the ninth and tenth 
centuries, appear to have given birth. "While the north 
was sinking beneath its own feuds and the ravages of the 
Northman, the closest ties knit together the men of the 
midland and the southern counties ; and this fellowship 
seems to have led, among the former, to a certain modi- 
fication of the northern dialect. The change seems to 
have been brought about, not so much by adopting the 
peculiarities of southern speech, as by giving greater 
prominence to such parts of the native dialect as were 
common to the south. The southern conjugations must, 
at all times, have been familiar (at least in dignified com- 
position) to the natives of the northern counties, but 
other conjugations were popularly used, and in the gradual 
disuse of these, and other forms peculiar to the north, the 
change consisted." 

By these and other reasons Mr Gruest is led to the 
conclusion " that in the middle of the fourteenth century 
there were three great English dialects — the northern, 
the midland, and the southern;" and he thinks, "that, 
even amid the multiplied varieties of the present day, 
these three divisions may yet be traced." Two vigorous 
efforts, he states, were made to detain and preserve the 
northern dialect as it was retreating northwards, and to 
fix it as a literary language : the first, in the thirteenth 
century, by the men of Lincolnshire ; the second, in the 
fifteenth century, by the men of Lothian ; " but the con- 
venience of a dialect essentially the same as the northern, 
and far more widely understood, its literary wealth, and 
latterly the patronage of the court, gave the midland 
English an ascendancy that gradually swept all rivalry 
before it." The southern dialect, it is added, kept its 
ground more firmly than the northern ; little more than 



90 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OE 

two centuries having gone by since it first began to give 
way before the midland dialect. 

Mr Gruest divides the midland dialect into six varie- 
ties ; and one of them, which he would term the Leices- 
tershire dialect, and which is described as "remarkable 
for its want of tone," has, he conceives, "contributed, 
more than any of our [other] living dialects, to the form- 
ation of our present standard English." 

Dr Latham {English Language, 555), holding that 
the parts where the purest English is most generally 
spoken are those between Huntingdon and Stamford, 
and agreeing with Mr Gruest so far as to think it nearly 
certain " that the dialect most closely allied to the 
dialect (or dialects) out of which the present literary 
language of England is developed is to be found either 
in Northamptonshire or the neighbouring counties," is 
inclined to look for it, not with Mr Gruest, in Leices- 
tershire, on the western side of that county, but rather in 
Huntingdonshire, on the eastern side. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 91 



XIX. The space from about the middle of the Fourteenth 
to the middle of the Sixteenth Century has been 
styled the Period of Middle English ; and that de- 
signation may be understood to express not only 
the position of the Period, but the fact that the ex- 
isting modification of the language, in respect both 
of its vocabulary and of its grammar, was then in 
a state of transition from its earliest and rudest 
form to that in which it was ultimately to rest. 
To the commencement of this Period belong the 
writings of Chaucer, the Homer of our Poetry and 
the true Father of English Literature. 

As has been pointed out by Mr Guest (JEng. Rhythms, 
ii. 105), the characteristic distinction of Old (or Early) 
English, as compared with the original form of the lan- 
guage, is the employment of the one termination e, in the 
declension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs, to re- 
present indiscriminately the three ancient vowel-endings, 
a, e, and u. In this way the ancient nama, ende, and 
wudu became in Early English nam-e, end-e, and wood-e, 
or wood-de. Now the distinction of Middle English, as 
compared with Early English, may be defined as being 
the tendency to drop this final e as a distinct syllable, 
and, along with that simplification, to throw off also 
whatever else remained of the original inflectional system 
of the language. 

Chaucer is believed to have died, at the age of seventy- 
two, in the year 1400. His writings may, therefore, be 



92 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF 

received as exemplifying the state of the language in the 
first half century of the present period. 

Even if we had no positive evidence on the subject, it 
would be impossible to believe that the language of a 
great popular poet could be other than substantially the 
language of his own age, — written, perhaps, with more 
regularity and refinement by him than by others, but 
certainly not with any absolute innovations or peculiari- 
ties either in the vocabulary or the grammar. In the 
case of Chaucer we have the most conclusive evidence 
that he wrote the common English of his day in the 
identity of his language in all essential respects with that 
of other writers who were his contemporaries. 

Moreover, by comparing him and his contemporaries 
with their predecessors and their followers, it is found 
that the changes undergone by the language exhibit only 
its natural progress under the operation of its inherent 
principles or tendencies. 

The English of the age of Chaucer, being the earlier 
part of the Middle or Transitional Period of the lan- 
guage in its revived condition, though reduced or restored 
to considerable regularity, has evidently not yet attained 
its final form and structure, but is still in a state of 
growth or movement under two tendencies which had 
been for some time previous at work in it, and had 
brought it to its actual condition : — the first, a tendency 
to drop more of the ancient native tongue ; the second, a 
tendency to assume more from the French. 

I. The tendency to retreat still farther from the native 
tongue is evinced by the gradual loosening and falling 
off of such of the signs or vestiges of the old inflectional 
system as had not yet been quite got rid of, as well as by 
the continued disappearance of Teutonic vocables. 



THE ENGLISH LANGFAGE. 93 

Thus : — the original termination of the infinitive, which 
had been already attenuated from an to en, is now often 
reduced to e ; e. g. the original spaecan, or specan (to 
speak), which had already in the previous stage of the 
language become speken, is now frequently written (and 
was, probably, still more frequently pronounced) spelce 
(in two syllables). 

In the present indicative the singular is only slightly 
altered from -e, -ast, -ath, to -e, -est, -eth (lufige, lufasi, luf- 
ath, becoming lov-e, lov-esf, lov-eth) ; but the termination 
of the plural persons, which had been originally ath, and 
had been first changed into eth, is now often further 
softened or shortened into en ; e. g. the original we, ge, hi, 
lufiath, had become we, ye, hi, or they loveth, or loven. 
Trevisa commonly has loveth ; Chaucer and Mandeville, 
loven. In the second person plural of the imperative, 
the eth (which also had been originally ath) was some- 
times shortened, not into en, but into e, — loveth ye, or 
love ye.* 

* The second person singular of the imperative may probably be re- 
garded as being the verb in its elementary or most naked form. Such, 
at least, has always been the case in English. Thus, in Chaucer : — 
" Our hoste saw that he was dronken of ale, 
And sayd, Abide, Robin, my leve brother." 

Cant. Tales, 3131. 
"The Reeve answered and saide, Stint thy clappe." 

Ibid. 3146. 
" Say forth thy tal?, and tarrxj not the time." 

Ibid. 3903. 
But both in this and in the other moods, as at present, the second 
person plural, with its proper pronoun, is commonly used in a singular 
sense; as: — 

" Now telleth ye, Sire Monk, if that ye conne, 
Somewhat to quiten with the Knightes tale." 

Cant. Tales, 3121. 



94 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OE 

The termination of the present participle, originally 
ende, has now, for the most part, passed into the more 
rapidly pronounceable ing, though it is still sometimes 
found as ende or end, ande or and, ente or ent, ante or ant. 

Finally, the termination e, both in the verb and in 
other parts of speech, even while it continued to be writ- 
ten, was beginning to be dropped in the pronunciation ; 
and in some words it was occasionally omitted in writing. 
According to Mr G-uest (JEng. Rhythms, i. 34), the word 
hire is always a monosyllable with Chaucer, whether it 
represents the Anglo-Saxon hire (her), or heora (their) ; 
and the e, he adds, " was also lost in other cases when it 
followed r, and, perhaps, when it followed other letters." 
In the first and third persons singular of the preterite of 
verbs, again, which regularly terminated in ede (the en- 
tire tense running, I lovede, thou lovedest, he lovede, ice 
loveden, ye loveden, they loveden), the e was beginning to 
be occasionally, though rarely, omitted (thus, I loved, he 
loved, as at present). 

It is admitted that in the earliest form of the language 
the termination e made always a distinct syllable, as much 
as a or u. And this appears to be the case also in the 
prosody of Chaucer, except only in a very few words, in 
which, as just observed, the e had by his time begun to 
be dropt in the pronunciation, although it was still re- 
tained in writing. The only other circumstances in which 
it counts for nothing are when it is elided in consequence 
of the following word beginning with a vowel. Ed and 
es in like manner certainly were then in all cases pro- 
nounced as distinct syllables ; thus, lov-es, lov-ed, lov-ed- 
est, lov-ed-en. 

But many words also were then written with a final e 
which have now lost that termination. 

It follows, therefore, that a great many words at this 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 95 

stage of the language had a syllable more than the same 
words now have. In some cases the final e, which con- 
stituted the syllable in question, has disappeared only in 
the pronunciation ; in other cases it has disappeared en- 
tirely, not only in our speech but in our writing. 

It does not seem to be disputed that Tyrwhitt has 
given a correct account of the origin of one class of these 
lost final e's. " With respect to words imported directly 
from France," he observes, "it is certainly quite natural 
to suppose that for some time they retained their native 
pronunciation." Thus such a word as hoste would con- 
tinue to be both written with an e final (called e feminine) 
and to be pronounced as a dissyllable, as it was in French, 
and as its modern representative, kote, still is, at least in 
verse and in the more formal style of elocution. It is to 
be supposed that in the anglicised word the final e was 
first dropt in the pronunciation and then retrenched in 
the spelling. In other words, again, borrowed from the 
French, the e, though dropt in the pronunciation, has 
been retained in the spelling, usually with the view of in- 
dicating a particular way of sounding a preceding vowel 
or consonant; as in large, where it softens the g, or 
in face, where it both softens the c and gives its name 
sound to the a. 

" We have not, indeed," Tyrwhitt proceeds to say, " so 
clear a proof of the original pronunciation of the Saxon 
part of our language ; but we know, from general observ- 
ation, that all changes of pronunciation are usually made 
by small degrees ; and, therefore, when we find that a 
great number of those words which in Chaucer's time 
ended in e originally ended in a, we may reasonably pre- 
sume that our ancestors first passed from the broader 
sound of a to the thinner sound of e feminine, and not at 
once from a to e mute. Besides, if the final e in such 



96 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOET OF 

words was not pronounced, why was it added ? From 
the time that it has confessedly ceased to be pronounced, it 
has been gradually omitted in them, except where it may 
be supposed of use to lengthen or soften the preceding 
syllable, — as in hope, name, &c. But, according to the 
ancient orthography, it terminates many words of Saxon 
original where it cannot have been added for any such 
purpose, as kerte, childe, olde, wilde, &c. In these, there- 
fore, we must suppose that it was pronounced as an e 
feminine, and made part of a second syllable ; and so, by 
a parity of reason, in all others in which, as in these, it 
appears to have been substituted for the Saxon 0." In 
a note he adds : — " In most of the words in which the 
final e has been omitted its use in lengthening or softening 
the preceding syllable has been supplied by an alteration 
in the orthography of that syllable. Thus, in grete, mete, 
stele, rede, dere, in which the first e was originally long, 
as closing a syllable, it has, since they have been pro- 
nounced as monosyllables, been changed either into ea, as 
in great, meat, steal, read, dear, or into ee, as in greet, meet, 
steel, reed, deer. In like manner, the o in bote,fole, dore, 
gode, mone, has been changed either into oa, as in boat, 
foal, or into oo, as in door, good, moon" 

It is only a part of this view of the origin of the e final 
in words even of native extraction that has been contro- 
verted. It is not denied that Tyrwhitt is right in regard 
to such words as in their original form ended either in e 
or in some other vowel which was equally represented by 
e in Early and Middle English. The only dispute is 
about such words as herte, bote, gode, &c, referred to by 
Tyrwhitt in the two last sentences of the passage above 
quoted, and in the annexed note. 

The theory of the late Mr Price is that the e in such 
cases was an addition made by the Gorman scribes, or dis- 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 97 

ciples of the Norman school of writing, for the purpose 
of marking or indicating according to their principle ot 
orthography that elongation of the preceding vowel which 
in the native English system was denoted by an accentual 
mark. Thus, for example, what in English orthography 
was god was in JSTorman gode ; what in the former was 
lif, was in the latter life; "and hence," concludes Mr 
Price, "the majority of those e'a mute upon which Mr 
Tyrwhitt has expended so much unfounded speculation." * 
Tyrwhitt can hardly be said to have expended any specu- 
lation upon the particular class of words which Mr Price 
thus seeks to explain. 

The question has been since examined more at length 
by Mr G-uest. It was, according to Mr Gruest, a funda- 
mental rule of ancient English orthography to double the 
final consonant in an accented syllable when the vowel 
was a short one, that is, when it had what has been 
called the shut sound ; and hence it came to be imagined 
that such a vowel should be followed and denoted by the 
doubliug of the consonant, whether the syllable was ac- 
cented or no. This, as we have seen, appears to have 
been the principle which Ormin followed, only regu- 
lating his spelling in conformity with it more uniformly 
or precisely than any other writer has done. But the 
old rule, Mr Guest conceives, also gave rise to another 
practice which has had a greater effect in deranging the 
orthography of the language. As the doubling of the 
consonant indicated a short or shut vowel sound, it fol- 
lowed that a single consonant would be the mark of the 
long, or what has been called the name sound ; in such 
words, for instance, as mone (the moon), time (time) 
name (name), that would be the sound of the vowel in 

* See his edition of "Warton's History of English Poetry (1824), 
Preface (114), and vol. i. p. cii. 

H 



98 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOEY OF 

the first syllable. "Now, in the Anglo-Saxon," the 
statement proceeds, " there was a great number of words 
which had, as it were, two forms ; one ending in a con- 
sonant, the other in a vowel. In the time of Chaucer, 
all the different vowel-endings were represented by the e 
final ; and so great is the number of words which this 
writer uses sometimes as monosyllables, and sometimes 
as dissyllables with the addition of the e, that he has 
been accused of adding to the number of his syllables 
whenever it suited the convenience of his rhythm. In 
his works we find hert and herte, bed and bedde, ertli and 
ertlie, &c. In the Anglo-Saxon we find corresponding 
duplicates, the additional syllable giving to the noun in 
almost every case a new declension, and in most a new 
gender. In some few cases the final e had become mute 
even before the time of Chaucer ; and it was wholly lost 
in the period which elapsed between his death and the 
accession of the Tudors. Still, however, it held its 
ground in our manuscripts, and ure (our), rose (a rose), 
&c, though pronounced as monosyllables, were still writ- 
ten according to the old spelling. Hence, it came gradu- 
ally to be considered as a rule that, when a syllable ended 
in a single consonant and mute e, the vowel was long." 
Mr Gruest has no doubt whatever that this is the origin 
of the very peculiar mode of indicating the long vowel 
which prevails in English orthography. To Mr Price's 
notion that the mode of spelling in question was the 
work of the Normans, he objects that the final e, which 
Mr Price conceives to have been annexed merely to de- 
note the long vowel, or to be a substitute for the ac- 
centual mark of the native system, was not mute in 
Norman French. — {JEng. Rhythms, i. 109.) 

It is not quite clear whether in Mr Gruest's view 
there are any cases in which the e may be supposed to 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 99 

nave had nothing corresponding to it in the Original 
English word, and to have been affixed merely to denote 
that the preceding vowel had the long or name sound 
after it had come, in the way that has been explained, to 
be a received rule of pronunciation that that .was the 
sound to be borne by a vowel whenever it was followed 
by a single consonant and an e. Mr Price appears to 
have considered the final e generally to have originated 
in this way ; and in that notion he probably held it a 
mistake to imagine that it had ever been pronounced as a 
distinct syllable.* 

One result, Mr G-uest goes on to observe, of this em- 
ployment of the final e mute to indicate a long vowel 
was to save many of our monosyllables from the dupli- 
cation of the final consonant. The mere absence of the 
e would be held to imply that the vowel had its short or 
shut sound. Having the name sound in white, pate, and 
rote, it would have the shut sound in whit, pat, and rot. 

Mr Gruest holds that there have been four systems 
employed at different periods to mark the quantity (in 
reference at least to the more recent stages of the lan- 
guage we ought rather to say the quality) of our English 
vowels. 1. In the so-called Anglo-Saxon or original 
form of the language the long time was properly marked 
by the acute accent : thus, god (good) was distinguished 
from God (Q-od). 2. Next it came to be marked in 
many instances by the doubling of the vowel : thus god 
was written good (perhaps originally pronounced as we 

* Mr Price's views were to have been more fully explained in a 
volume which, was announced in his edition of Warton as shortly to he 
published, but which has never appeared, entitled " Illustrations of 
Warton' s History of English Poetry; containing An Ex- 
amination of Mr Tyrwhitt's Essay on the Language and Versification 
of Chaucer," &c. 

h % 



100 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

now pronounce goad). 3. The long or name sound was 
indicated simply by leaving the following consonant 
single; thus, Ormin probably intended his shep to be 
sounded sheep. 4. The same effect was produced by the 
mute e. And our modern practice, Mr Guest thinks, is 
to a certain extent a combination, or rather a confusion, 
of the three last systems. (Eng. Rhythms, i. 110.) 

It is never to be forgotten, in the consideration of this 
subject, that every one of our English vowel letters re- 
presents, in our established system of orthography, not 
only different quantities of the same sound, but totally 
different sounds. After the explanations we have quoted, 
Mr Guest proceeds: — ""We have hitherto denominated 
certain vowels long and short, as though we considered 
the only difference between them to be their time ; as, 
though, for instance, the vowel in meet differed from that 
in met only in its being longer. The truth is, they are of 
widely different quality. The spelling of many words 
has remained unchanged for a period during which we 
have the strongest evidence of a great change in our pro- 
nunciation. When the orthography of the words meet 
and met was settled, the vowels in all probability differed 
only in respect of time ; but they have now been changing 
for some centuries, till they have nothing in common be- 
tween them but a similarity in their spelling." 

The assumption that sounds which are represented 
by the same letter are always either the same or differ 
only in quantity is what has most perplexed the treat- 
ment of this subject. The fact is, that in some cases the 
sounds are totally different in kind. Even the a in fan, 
the a in bath, and the a in was, are, strictly speaking, all 
distinguishable in quality, though perhaps nearly related, 
and having a tendency to pass into one another ; the same 
may be said of the o in note, and the o in hog (which, 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 101 

again, is the same sound in quality or kind with that of 
the a in was), and perhaps of the u in but, and the u in 
full (the same essentially with the oo in good), and the u 
in tune (which is otherwise represented by ew, as in pew ; 
by ue, as in due ; by eau, as in beauty ; and it may be, in 
other ways). But the sound of a in pane (the same, 
only longer, with that of e in pen) is totally different 
from the other sounds of a in pan, and a in pawn. So is 
the sound of e in men from its sound in me. So, finally, 
is the sound of i in pin from its sound in pine. In all 
these cases the difference is one not merely of length, or 
not of length at all, but of quality or kind ; and the two 
sounds are fully as distinct, or as wide apart, as any two 
vowel sounds in the language. 

The English way of reading Latin is to read it exactly 
as English is read. For instance, the long a in orator, 
being the accented syllable (as the penult always is when 
long), is sounded like the a in pane ; but the equally 
long a in oratoris, not having the accent upon it, is 
sounded like the a in pan. The vowel is treated in the 
two words exactly as it is in the two English words 
oration and oratory. The effect of this system is that in 
all accented syllables ending in a vowel (although by no 
means in other circumstances), a long a is pronounced 
like the a in pane, a long e like the e in me, and a long i 
like the i in pine ; while a short a takes commonly the 
sound of a in pan, a short e that of e in net, and a short 
i that of i in pin. 

English writers upon the subject of pronunciation 
have thus been very generally led to assume that the two 
sounds, connected in these several cases by being repre- 
sented by the same letter, are similarly connected as cor- 
responding long and short sounds in nature. There is 
scarcely a disquisition on the subject to be found in the 



102 OUTLINES OF THE HISTOBY OF 

language which is not more or less tainted with this fal- 
lacy. Even where it is perceived and admitted that the 
two sounds differ in kind, or, in other words, that they 
are quite distinct sounds, a notion or half notion is still 
apt to lurk, both in the nomenclature and in the reason- 
ing, that the one is naturally the short sound of the 
other. 

The fact is, that, in so far as respects mere length, the 
sounds in question can hardly be characterised as dis- 
tinguishable into two sets. At any rate, a syllable, the 
vowel sound in which is what is called the short a, e, 
or i, may certainly be made to occupy, and often does 
occupy, as much time in the enunciation as one in which 
the vowel sound is what is called the long a, e, or i. 
Every classical scholar, indeed, is familiar with one form 
of this fact, in the prolongation of a short vowel in the 
Greek and Latin by what is called position, or the cir- 
cumstance of its being followed by two consonants. Even 
in these ancient languages, however, it is worth noting 
that, while position makes a short vowel long, or, as we 
are told, doubles its time, it is not held, at least in pro- 
sodical effect, to make a long vowel either twice as long, 
or any longer at all. But in English, two things are re- 
markable in connexion with this matter: — 1. That, upon 
any definition or understanding of the terms long and 
short that can be proposed, what is called a short vowel, 
or the syllable in which it stands, may be long without 
position ; 2. That such a vowel or syllable may be short 
with or notwithstanding position. 

Here again, however, English scholars have almost 
universally been blinded to the plainest facts in their 
own language by their classical preconceptions. Because 
a vowel followed by two consonants is long in Greek and 
Latin, it has been commonly assumed that it is always 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 103 

long in a similar position in English too. And this un- 
founded notion has been productive of the greater con- 
fusion, inasmuch as it runs directly counter to the other 
prejudice just adverted to, which holds the sound that a 
vowel commonly has in this situation to be short. Thus, 
for example, while the monosyllable win is held to be 
short, the same combination of letters, retaining precisely 
the same sound, when it comes to form the first syllable 
of the word winter, is half regarded as long ; and that 
although it is hardly pretended that any more time is 
taken to pronounce it in the one case than in the other. 

In truth, however the matter may stand in Latin, in 
English some of the syllables that would be accounted 
long under the rule of position are among the slightest 
and shortest in the language ; such, for instance, as the 
conjunction and, and the terminations ant and ent. In 
regard to this point there can be no doubt that the pro- 
nunciation of the one language is constructed upon a 
different principle from that of the other. Whatever 
may be the true nature of the distinction between what 
are denominated long and short syllables, which is un- 
questionably the basis of Latin prosody and Latin verse, 
it is certain that a vowel standing in position, and the 
syllable containing that vowel, are uniformly ranked with 
and treated as belonging prosodically to one of the two 
classes into which vowels and .syllables are divided, — 
namely, to that which is described as long. It is possible 
that by the terms long and snort the ancient grammarians 
may have meant nothing more than accented and unac- 
cented. All that is necessary to be affirmed here is, 
that accent is, at any rate, the sole principle of English 
prosody and of English verse. And in English a syllable of 
which the vowel is in position is by no means necessarilv 



104 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OE 

an accented syllable, or one having prosodieaUy the force 
of such. 

Mr Gruest believes that the e final in Chaucer and 
other writers of the same age is frequently the e of in- 
flection of the original form of the language. Thus, in 
the opening couplet of the Canterbury Tales, — 

" Whanne that April with his shoures sote 
The drought of March had perced to the rote," 

he holds the e of sote to be the sign of the plural, and 
the e of rote to be most probably the sign of the dative 
singular ; the common form of the original word for root 
being rot. Again, he conceives that in the following 
verse, 

" Hire gretest othe n'as but by Seint Loy," 

othe represents the ancient genitive plural aiha ; so that 
hire gretest othe means her greatest of oaths. In support 
of this interpretation he adduces from the Geste of King 
Horn the expression " Eiche menne sones " (that is, sons 
of rich men) ; from Piers Plowman, that of " poure menne 
cotes" {poor men's cots); and from Grower's Confessio 
Amantis, that of " her horse knave " (their horses groom).* 
Moreover, he looks upon the final e of the adjective as 
being not only the sign of the plural (as in shoures sote), 
and the mark of what is called the definite declension, or 
the form which the adjective takes after the, or this, or 
that, or a possessive pronoun (as in the gret-e see, and this 
sik-e man, and hire whit-e voluper-e, that is, her white 
cap), but the affixed e which in the Original English con- 

* Eng. Rhythms, i. 30—33. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 105 

verted an adjective into an adverb. Thus, in the line 
from the Clerke's Tale, in the Canterbury Tales, 

" And in a cloth of gold that bright-e shone," 

he regards bright-e as representing, not our present ad- 
jective bright, but our adverb brightly. In the super- 
lative, however, he affirms, it is not the adverb, but the 
adjective, that takes the e ; in other words, that brightest 
is brighteste, and that brightliest is brightest.* 

The full account, then, of that most remarkable among 
the peculiarities which distinguish the English of Chau- 
cer from that of the present day, the e terminating 
so many of his words, and always forming a syllable, 
which has now disappeared altogether from the pronun- 
ciation, and in great part from the spelling, of the lan- 
guage, may be comprised in the five following proposi- 
tions: — 

1. In words borrowed from the French it is, as 
pointed out by Tyrwhitt, the e feminine of that lan- 
guage, still universally retained both in French ortho- 
graphy and French prosody, though in English it has 
ceased to be pronounced, and only continues to be written 
where its presence is necessary to indicate the sound of 
a preceding vowel or consonant. 

2. In nouns of native origin it is, in many cases, as 

* Eng. Rhythms, i. 29. The example that Mr Guest gives of this 
last canon is the following line in the Prologue to the Canterbury 
Tales .— 

" And fro the time that hejirste began." 

And so, indeed, the line is printed by Tyrwhitt. But it is evident 
that, according to the canon, firste ought to he first. And that amend- 
ment is also required by the prosody, if, as is believed to be the case, 
the final e in Chaucer always (except in hire, and, it may be, two or 
three other words) makes a distinct syllable when the following word 
begins with a consonant. 



106 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

also pointed out by Tyrwhitt, the substitute for, or rem- 
nant of, the ancient nominative singular termination 
(which was either e, or a, or u). 

3. In other native nouns, according to Mr Gruest, it is 
the e of the original dative singular, or genitive plural, or 
nominative plural in adjectives, or the sign of the definite 
form of the adjective, or of the adverb as distinguished 
from the adjective, or of the superlative of the adjective 
as distinguished from the superlative of the adverb. 

4. In the verb, as pointed out by Tyrwhitt, it is the 
termination, in the stage at which the language had ar- 
rived through the decay of the ancient grammatical system, 
of the first person singular of the present indicative and 
the first and third persons singular of the perfect, and of 
one form of the second person plural of the imperative, 
and one form of the infinitive. 

5. In many words of native derivation, howsoever it 
may have originated — whether from some primitive form, 
or, as Mr Price conceives, merely in an orthographical 
expedient — it probably gave the name sound to a preced- 
ing vowel, or served to indicate that it had such sound ; 
being itself, however, at the same time a distinct syllable 
in this as well as in all other cases. 

The other principal peculiarities that distinguish the 
grammar of Chaucer's English from that of the English 
of the present day are the following : — 

The substantive verb to ben (our to be) was inflected 
in the singular of the present indicative as it still is ; but 
the form throughout the plural was aren or ben. So in 
the imperfect the plural form was weren. 

Our to have was to haven, or to han, which in the pre- 
sent was inflected by have, havest or hast, haveth or liath 
for the singular, and by haven or han for the plural ; and 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 107 

in the imperfect by hadde, haddest, hadde for the singular, 
and hadden for the plural. 

They then said shal in the singular, but shullen in the 
plural, of the present ; shulde in the singular, and shulden 
in the plural, of the imperfect. 

In the present they said wil or wol in the singular, 
willen or wollen in the plural ; in the imperfect, wolde in 
the singular, wolden in the plural. 

In the present they said can or con in the singular 
and connen in the plural ; in the imperfect, coude in the 
singular, and couden in the plural. Our established 
spelling of could with an I has arisen from its being as- 
sumed by mistake that its original form was similar to 
those of should and would. 

May then made in the present may or mow in the 
singular, and mowen in the plural; in the imperfect, 
moughte or mighte in the singular, moughten or mighten in 
the plural. 

The first personal pronoun was generally I, as at pre- 
sent, but sometimes Ich, or Iche ; in the plural of the 
pronoun of the second person ye was always used for the 
nominative, you for the accusative ; our they was some- 
times hi ; them was usually hem (nearly the same with 
our present colloquial 'em, which little more than a cen- 
tury ago was commonly used also in writing) ; and their 
was usually hire, which (pronounced in all its senses as a 
monosyllable) was also the form both for the adjective 
pronoun her and for the accusative of the personal pro- 
noun she. 

II. The tendency of the English of the age of Chaucer 
to approximate still more to the French is indicated by 
the continued adoption of new words of French extrac- 



108 OUTLINES OP THE HISTORY OE 

tion, often in substitution for native ones ; and this pro- 
cess goes on, for the most part at an accelerating rate, to 
about the end of the fifteenth century. • 

No additional words were now borrowed or revived from 
the English of the period before the Conquest. 

Of the words used by Chaucer and the other writers 
of that time which have now become obsolete, some in- 
deed are French, but the greater number are of native 
growth. This fact, while it indicates the tendency of the 
language, or of its vocabulary, goes also to corroborate 
the probability that Chaucer, in the extent to which he 
employed words of French origin, only followed, and did 
not by any means go beyond, the demand of the time, 
and the natural movement of the language. 

Out of the practice of borrowing words from the 
French there grew another of fabricating similar words 
directly from the Latin, the great source of the French. 
In this way many words of Latin formation found their 
way into the English which the French had never pos- 
sessed, but which were all constructed nevertheless upon 
the model of those that had been received through the 
medium of that language. Thus, for example, every such 
word formed from a Latin substantive in tio was made to 
end in tion, and every one formed from a Latin substan- 
tive in itas in ity (after the French ite). 

These are the aureate terms, their pedantic and excess- 
ive employment of which Campbell {Essay on English 
Poetry, xlviii.) objects in particular against the Scottish 
versifiers of the fifteenth century, the generality of whom, 
he observes, " when they meant to be most eloquent, tore 
up words from the Latin, which never took root in the 
language, like children making a mock garden with flowers 
and branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither." 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 109 

But, although many of the words thus transplanted 
from the French and Latin never effected a cohesion with 
the soil of the language, and some may perhaps never have 
been used except by the writer who introduced them, 
many took firm root, and they now constitute a large and 
indispensable portion of our national speech. Among 
them are all our substantives ending in tion and sion ; all 
those in ity ; all in ance and ancy, ence and ency, with their 
connected adjectives in ant and ent ; most of those in ment 
(for some are hybrids, made up of this Latin termination 
annexed to an English root) ; all in tor, tory, and ure ; 
all adjectives in ary and ory, in ic and ical, in ive, He, and 
ible, and most of those in able ; and all verbs in ate, act, 
ect, id, and fy ; besides various smaller classes of words.* 

Dr Latham (English Language, 3rd edit., 101) de- 
scribes what he designates the Latin of the Third Period 
or that which was introduced between the Norman Con- 
quest and the revival of literature (which for England 
may be understood to mean the beginning of the six- 
teenth century), as having " chiefly originated with the 
monks, in the universities, and, to a certain extent, in the 
courts of law." But the fact is, that most of the words 
of Latin or French derivation, which found their way 
into the language in this interval, were introduced by 
the authors of the most popular literature of the day. 

* The most complete examination to which the English language 
has been subjected with a view to the determination of the proportion 
which its vocabulary contains of Latin or French is that which it has 
received in a little work by Dr J. P. Thommerel, entitled u Recherches 
sur la Fusion du Franco-Normand et de V Anglo-Saxon," Paris, 
1841. I have discussed this question in the Second of a series of 
papers entitled " Curiosities of the English Language," published in 
the Dublin University Magazine for October 18o7. 



110 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 

Perhaps it would be better not to distinguish this Latin 
of the Third Period from what Dr Latham calls the Latin 
of the Fourth Period, or that introduced between the re- 
vival of literature and the present time, but to regard the 
latter as only a continuation of the former. Up to about 
the commencement of the sixteenth century French and 
Latin may be said to have flowed into the language in a 
stream, or to have been drunk up by it as if it were 
athirst ; but about that date the point of saturation would 
seem to have been reached, or the appetite of absorption 
to have been quenched : it has since received only single 
words, as occasion arose. 

The unripe or unconsolidated condition of the language, 
more especially at the commencement of the period of 
Middle English, or of its passage from Early English to 
Modern English, is indicated by the fluctuating accentua- 
tion of many of the words it was then appropriating from 
the French. Chaucer has, for instance, in one place virtue, 
in another virtue ; in one place nature, in another nature ; 
in one place langdge, in another langage ; the first of the 
two modes of accentuation in each case being the French, 
the second the English one. For some time probably 
the former would be the more prevalent ; but ultimately 
all these imported words adopted the English accentua- 
tion, and entirely lost their native one ; thus showing 
that the predominant genius of the language in its music, 
as well as in its grammar, was still English. 

Latin, either in its original state, or transformed into 
French, is the only foreign element with which the 
Gothic basis of our language has combined to any large 
extent. 

In modern times, it is true, a vast number of scientific 






THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. Ill 

and technical terms have been fabricated from the Greek ; 
and this is the only manufacture of additions to our voca- 
bulary upon a considerable scale that still goes on. But 
such words do not belong to the flesh and blood of the 
language at all ; they may be styled its non-natural part, 
or an artificial appendage to it ; they stand in the same 
relation to its proper substance in which the tools that a 
man works with stand to his living person. 



112 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF 



XX. Confining ourselves to the history of the English 
language since the Norman Conquest, we may call 
the First Century after that date its Infancy ; the 
Second its childhood ; the Third its Boyhood ; the 
Fourth and Fifth its Youth, or Adolescence ; and 
the time that has since elapsed its Manhood. Its 
Infancy and Childhood will thus correspond with 
what is usually designated the Period of Semi- 
Saxon; its Boyhood with that of Early English; 
its Youth with that of Middle English ; its Man- 
hood with that of Modern English. 

It is. evident, from what has been stated in the preced- 
ing Sections, that the only natural, or scientific, division 
of the history of the English language in its entire extent 
is into the three following stages : — 

1. That of its original form, when it retained intact 
both the integrity of its Grammar (or inflectional system) 
and the homogeneousness of its Vocabulary ; being that 
in which it subsisted during the period preceding the 
Norman Conquest, and in which it is commonly spoken 
of by modern philologists under the name of the Saxon, 
or Anglo-Saxon ; 

2. That of its degradation into an illiterate patois by 
the breaking up of its Grammar, though without the in- 
trusion of any foreign element into its Vocabulary (cor- 
responding to what is commonly called the Semi-Saxon) ; 
being that in which it is found for the first two centuries 
after the Conquest ; 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 113 

3. That of its acquisition of both a new form and a 
new spirit or genius by the combination of the original 
G-othic basis of its Vocabulary with a Latin (Romance, 
Norman, or French) element ; being that in which it still 
is, and comprehending the periods usually called those of 
Early English, of Middle English, and of Modern English. 

The three successive and distinct states or forms may 
be most properly designated : — the First, that of Pure or 
Simple English; the Second, that of Broken or Semi- 
English; the Third, that of Mixed or Compound English.* 

But the following Table gives us a convenient enough 
technical division (convenient to be known, at any rate, 
as being that currently assumed) of so much of the history 
of the language as is subsequent to the Norman Conquest, 
at which date it may be considered to have, as it were, 
started upon a new career :f — 

* See this scheme of the true History of the Language explained 
and illustrated in Chapter First of " The Curiosities of the English 
Language," published in the Dublin University Magazine for July 
1857. 

t The dates in the Table are accommodated to the Kings' reigns ; 
but the Periods and Ages may be most conveniently considered as ex- 
tending from about the middle of one century to the middle of another, 
and as therefore consisting in each case of one or more centuries. And, 
of course, as with the human being to which it is compared, the lan- 
guage was making progress during or within each of the stages into 
which its history may be thus divided, as much as in passing from one 
to another of them. 



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ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 



I. Original English ; English Pure or Simple (Saxon, or 
Anglo-Saxon). 

1. From the Voyage of OhtJier in Alfred's Translation of 
Orosius, Book i. : — before a.d. 900. 

And thaer is mid Estum dheaw, thonne thaer bidh man 
dead, thaet lie lidh inne unforbaerned mid his magum 
and freondum monadh, ge hwilum twegen, and tha kyn- 
ingas and tha odhre heahdhungene men swa micle lencg 
swa hi maran speda habbadh ; hwilum healf gear thaet hi 
beodh unforbaerned, and licgadh bufan eorthan on hyra 
husum. And, ealle tha hwile the thaet lie bidh inne, thaer 
sceal beon gedrync and plega, odh thone daeg the hi hine 
forbaernadh. 

[And there is with Esthonians a custom, when there is one dead, 
that he lieth within unburnt with his kinsmen and friends a month, 
yea sometimes (whiles, Scot.) twain, and the kings and the other high- 
spoken-of men so much (mickle, Scot.) longer as they more wealth 
{lit, speed) have ; sometimes [it is] half a year that they be unburnt, 
and lie above earth in their houses. And, all the while that the corpse 
is within, there shall be [it is the custom that there be] drinking and 
play until the day that they it burn.] 
i 2 



116 ILLTJSTRATIYE SPECIMEN'S. 



2. From the latter portion of the Chronicle : — about 1100. 

A.D. 1087.— . . . Dhissum thus gedone, se cyng 
Willelm cearde ongean to Normandige. . . He swealt 
on Normandige on thone nextan daeg aefter nativitas See 
Marie ; and man begyrgede hine on Oathum aet See 
[Sci?] Stephanes mynstre. . . Grif hwa gewilniged to 
gewitane hu gedon man he was, odhdhe hwilcne wurdh- 
scipe he haefde, odhdhe hu fela lande he waere hlaford, 
thonne wille we be him awritan swa swa we hine ageaton ; 
we him onlocodan, and odhre hwile on his hirede wunedon. 
. . He saette mycel deorfridh, and he laegde laga thaer 
widh ; thaet swa hwa swa sloge heort odhdhe hinde thaet 
hine man sceold blendian. He forbead tha heortas,* 
swylce eac tha baras. Swa swidhe he lufode tha heodeor 
swylce he waere heora faeder. Eac he saette be tham 
haran thaet hi mosten freo faran. His rice men hit maen- 
don, and tha earme men hit beceorodan ; ac he waes swa 
stidh thaet he ne rohte heora eallra nidh. 

[This thus done, the King William turned again to Normandy. . . 
He died in Normandy on the next day after (the) nativity of St Mary 
{Nativitas Sanctce Maries) ; and man (Ger. man, Fr. on, anciently 
homme) huried him in Caen, at St Stephen's minster. . . If any may 
wish to know how to do man (what kind of man) he was, or what 
worship he had, or of how many lands he was lord, then will we hy (in 
regard to) him write so as we him knew : we him beheld, and other while 
in his household wonned (dwelt) ... He set much deer free-ground 
(he made many deer-parks), and he laid (down) laws therewith ; that 
whoso slew hare or hind that him man should blind. As he forbade 

* We ought, apparently, to read— thest hwa swa slope heort, and 
Swa he forbead tha heortas. The passage, from He scette mycel deor- 
fridh is probably in rhyme, although Dr Ingram's proposed substitu- 
tion of blinde for blendian is inadmissible without a verb in the in- 
finitiYe after sceold. 



ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 117 

[to slay] the harts, so also the hoars. So much he loved the high-deer 
as he were their father. Also he set hy (appointed regarding) the 
hares that they must free fare. His rich men it moaned, and the poor 
men it lamented ; but he was so stern, that he recked not the hatred 
of them all.] 

The element printed dh in these two extracts is to be sounded as the 
h in this. It is represented in the MSS., and in the common so-called 
Saxon printing, by one character ; as the th heard in thin is by another. 
But there is by no means a perfect correspondence, as to this matter, 
between the old language and our present English ; nor, indeed, are 
the two characters distinguished with any uniformity of usage in the 
MSS. 



118 ILLUSTKATIVE SPECIMENS. 



II. (1.) Broken English, or Semi-English (Semi-Saxon): 
A.D. 1050—1250. 

3. The Commencement of Layamori 's Brut, according to 
the oldest of the two Versions, MS. Cott. Calig. A. ix. : 
—about 1200.* 

An preost wes on leoden ; 
Layamon wes ihoten ; 
He wes Leovenadhes sone : 
Lidhe him beo Drihte. 
He wonede at Eraleye, 
At aedhelen are chirechen, 
Uppen Sevarne stalhe : 
Sel thar him thuhte ; 
On fest E-adestone ; 
Ther he bock radde. 
Hit com him on mode, 
And on his mern thonke, 
Thet he wolde of Engle 
Tha SBdhelsen tellen ; 
"Wat heo ihoten weoren, 
And wonene heo comen, 
Tha Englene londe 
JSrest ahten 

* In this and other Extracts the ancient fashion of writing and print- 
ing i for,;, u for v, and v for w, in particular circumstances, has not 
been adhered to, though preserved by some of the modern editors. It 
is merely a different mode of forming the letters in question, which 
cannot be supposed to have affected their sound. 



ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 119 

^Efter than node, 

The from Drihtene com, 

The al her a-qnelde 

Quic that he funde, 

Bnten Noe and Sem, 

Japhet and Cham, 

And heore fonr wives, 

The mid heom weren on archen. 

[A priest was on earth (or, perhaps, in the land, or among the 
people) ; Layamon was [he] (called); he was Leovenath's son; gra- 
cious to him be [the] Lord. He wonned (dwelt) at Ernley, at a 
noble church, upon Severn's bank, — good there to him [it] seemed— 
near Radestone ; there he book read. It came to him in mind, and in 
his chief (?) thought, that he would of Englishmen the noble-deeds 
tell ; what they called were, and whence they came, that English land 
first owned, after the flood, that from [the] Lord came, that all here 
quelled (destroyed), quick (alive) that it found, but Noah and Shem, 
Japheth and Ham, and their four wives, that with them were in [the] 
ark.] 

In the later version, MS. Cott. Otho, C. xiii., the passage stands 
thus : — 

A prest was in londe ; 
Laweman was hote ; 
He was Lencais sone : 
Lef him beo drifte. 
He wonede at Ernleie, 
"Wid than gode cnithte ; 
Uppen Sevarne ; 
Merie ther him thohte ; 
Faste bi Radistone : 
Ther heo bokes radde. 
Hit com him on mode, 
And on his thonke, 



120 ILLUSTEATIYE SPECIMENS. 

That he wolde of Engelond 
The riftnesse telle ; 
Wat the men hi-hote weren, 
And wancne hi comen, 
The Englene lond 
-<Erest afden 
After than node, 
That fram God com ; 
That al ere acwelde 
Cwic that hit ftmde, 
Bot Noe and Sem, 
Japhet and Cam, 
And hire four wifes, 
That mid ham there weren. 

Tn this version Sir F. Madden conjectures that hote, in line 2, should 
be ihote ; that heo, in line 10, should be he; and that wancne, in line 
16, should be wanene. 



4. Layamon's Description (with the two hemistichs, or 
short lines, printed as a single verse) of the arming 
of Prince Arthur before the Battle of B addon Hill, 
or Bath (A.D. 520 ?), from the Brut, 21,149— 
21,168 ; Madden, n. 464-5 : — also given, xmih one or 
two variations, by Guest, Eng. Mh. n. 118, 119 : — 
from MS. Cott. Calig. A. ix : — about 1200. 

He heng an his sweore Eenne sceld deore ; 

His nome was on Bruttisc Pridwen ihaten : 

Ther was innen igraven mid rede golde staven 

An on-licnes deore of Drihtenes moder. 

His spere he nom an honde, tha Eon wes ihaten. 

Tha he hafden al his iweden tha leop he on his steden. 



ILLITSTEATIYE SPECIMENS. 121 

Tha he mihte behalden tha bihalves stoden 
Thene vaeireste cniht the verde scolde leden ; 
Ke isaeh naevere na man selere cniht nenne 
Thenne him wes Ardhur, adhelest cunnes." 

That is, literally : — 

He hung on his neck a dear [precious] shield ; 

Its name was in British called Pridwen : 

There was within [on it] engraven with red gold tracings 

A dear likeness of the Lord's mother. 

His spear he took in hand, that was called Eon. 

When he had all his weeds [accoutrements], then leapt he on his 

steed. 
Then they might "behold that heside stood 
The fairest knight that host should lead ; 
Nor saw never no man better knight none 
Than he was, Arthur, noblest of kin. 

In the later version, MS Cott. OtLo, C. xiii. (1250 ?), this passage 
stands : — 

He heng on his swere one sceald deore ; 

His name was in Bruttisse Pridewyn ihote ; 

That (thar ?) was hine igraved on anlichnesse of golde, 

That was mid isothe Drihtene moder. 

His spere he nam an honde, that Eon was ihote. 

Tho he hadde al his wede, tho leop he on his stede. 

Tho hii mihte bi-holde that thar bi-halves were 

Thane fairest cniht that ferde sal leade. 

(The two concluding lines do not occur in the later MS.) 

The y which occurs in Layamon, Ernleye, 'and other words, is 
represented in the original by a character the form of which, as well 
as its position, would seem' to indicate that it represented a sound com- 



122 ILLTJSTEATITE SPECIMENS. 

billing that of g and y, or intermediate between the two. In the 
modern language it has for the most part become y before a vowel, and 
g hard, or gh, elsewhere. It never can have had any resemblance to 
the sound of z, by which it has sometimes been ignorantly rendered in 
modern reprints of old English and Scottish texts. In the later 
version of Layamon this character appears much less frequently than 
in the earlier version, and that representing dh does not occur at all. 



ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMEN'S. 123 



III. (2.) Compound English; A.D. 1250— (Early English; 
1250-1350). 

5. Dedication by the Author of the Ormulum to his 
Brother .—about 1250 ? 

Nu, brotherr Wallterr, brotherr min affterr the flaeshess 

kinde; 
And brotherr min i Crisstenndom thurrh fulluhht and 

thurrh trowwthe ; 
And brotherr min i Grodess hus, yet o the thride wise, 
Thurrh thatt witt hafenn takenn ba an reghellboc to 

follghenn, 
Unnderr kanunnkess had and lif, swa summ Sannt 

Awwstin sette ; 
Ice hafe don swa summ thu badd, and fortheddte thin 

wille; 
Ice hafe wennd inntill Ennglissh goddspelless halghe 

lare, 
Affterr thatt little witt tatt me min Drihhten hafethth 

lenedd. 

[Now, brother Walter, brother mine after the flesh's kind ; 

And brother mine in Christendom, through baptism and through 

truth (faith) ; 
And brother mine in God's house, yet in the third wise, 
Through (for) that we have taken both one rule-book to follow, 
Under (the) canon's rank and life so as Saint Austin ruled ; 
I have done so as thou badest, and furthered thy will (wish) ; 
I have turned into English [the] Gospel's holy lore, 
After that little wit that me my Lord hath lent.] 



6. The Commencement of Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle, 

as printed by Hearne : — about 1300. 
Engelond ys a wel god lond, ich wene of eche lond best, 
Tset in the ende of the world, as al in the "West. 



124 ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 

The see goth hym al a boute, he stont as an yle. 

Here fon heo durre the lasse doute, but hit be thorw 

gyfe 

Of fol of the selve lond, as me hath y seye wyle. 
From South to North he is long eighte honored myle ; 
And foure honored myle brod from Est to West to 

wende, 
Amydde tho lond as yt be, and noght as by the on ende. 
Plente me may in Engelond of alle gode y se, 
Bute fole yt for gulte other yeres the worse be. 
For Engelond ys ful ynow of fruyt and of tren, 
Of wodes and of parkes, that joye yt ys to sen ; 
Of foules and of bestes, of wylde and tame al so ; 
Of salt fysch and eche fresch, and fayre ryveres ther to ; 
Of welles swete and colde ynow, of lesen and of mede ; 
Of selver or and of gold, of tyn and of lede ; 
Of stel, of yrn, and of bras ; of god corn gret won 
Of whyte and of wolle god, betere ne may be non. 

[England is a very good land, I ween of every land [the] best ; set 
in the end of the world, as [being] wholly in the west. The sea goeth 
it all about ; it standeth as an isle. Their foes they need the less fear, 
except it be through guile of folk of the same land, as one hath seen 
sometimes. From South to North it is long eight hundred mile ; and 
four hundred mile broad from East to West to wend, amid the land as 
it be, and not as by the one end. Plenty one may in England of all 
good see, except (were it not for) folk that for guilt some years the 
worse be. For England is full enough of fruit and of trees ; of woods 
and of parks, that joy it is to see ; of fowls and of beasts, of wild and 
tame also ; of salt fish and eke fresh, and fair rivers thereto ; of wells 
sweet and cold enow, of pasture and of mead ; of silver ore and of gold, 
of tin and of lead ; of steel, of iron, and of brass ; of good corn great 
store ; of wheat and of good wool, better may be none.] 



1LLUSTEATIYE SPECIMENS. 125 



7. Robert de Brunne's Account of the Alteration of the 
Coinage by Edward I. in 1282, from his Translation 
of Peter Langtoffs Chronicle : — about 1340. 

Now turnes Edward ageyn to London his cite, 
And wille wite certeyn l who schent 2 has his mone. 
Of clippers, of roungers, 3 of suilk 4 takes he questis ; 
Old used traitoures ilk at other hand kestis. 
Ilk these other out said, ilk a schrewe other greves ; 5 
Of fele 6 were handes laid, and hanged ther as theves. 
Edward did smyte 7 rounde peny, halfpeny, ferthing, 
Thecroise 8 passed the bounde of alle thorghout the ryng. 
The kynge's side salle he the hede and his name writen ; 
The croyce side what cite it was in coyned and smyten. 
The povere man ne the preste the peny prayses no thing. 
Men gyf God the lest, 9 the fesse 10 him with a ferthing. 
A thousand and two hundred and fourscore yeres mo, 11 
Of this mone men wondred first when it gan go.* 

1 Know certainly. 2 Corrupted. * Nippers. 4 Such. 

5 Hk and ilk a mean every with De Brunne, as they still do in the 
Scottish dialect : and kestis is casts ; hut, perhaps, scarcely more than 
a doubtful sense can he extracted from these two lines, as Hearne 
has printed them. His Glossary affords no aid towards their interpret- 
ation. 

6 Many. ' Strike. 

8 Cross (the oi or oy bein? probably pronounced nearly as our o in 
the modern form of the word, or somewhat as the oi in the French 
croix). 

9 Least. 10 They feast. » More. 

* From Hearne's Edition, 238, 239.— Of course the e makes a dis- 
tinct syllable in such words as cite and mone. 



126 ILLUSTRATIYE SPECIMENS. 



(Middle English. A.D. 1350—1550). 

8. Commencement of Minotfs Poem on the Battle of 
Halidon Kill, fought a.d. 1333 -.—about 1350. 

Trew king, that sittes in trone, 

Unto the I tell my tale, 
And unto the I bid a bone l 

For thou ert bute 2 of all my bale : 
Als thou made midelerd and the mone, 3 

And bestes and fowles grete and smale, 
Unto me send thi socore sone, 

And dresce my dedes in this dale. 4 

1 Offer a prayer. 2 Boot, remedy. 

3 As thou madest middle-earth and the moon. 

4 Direct my deeds in this vale (of misery). 



9. Commencement of the Vision of Tiers Ploughman, 
from Wright's Edition, 1842 -.—about 1360. 

In a somer seson 
Whan soffce was the sonne, 
I shoop me into shroudes l 
As I a sheep 2 weere, 
In habite as an heremite 
Unholy of werkes, 



ILLUSTEATIYE SPECIMENS. 127 

"Went wide in this world 
Wondres to here ; 
Ac 3 on a May morwenynge 
On Malverne hilles 
Me befel a ferly, 4 
Of fairye me thoghte. 
I was wery 5 for-wandred, 
And went me to reste 
Under a brood 6 bank 
By a bournes syde ; 
And as I lay and lenede, 
And loked on the watres, 
I slombred into a slepyng, 
It sweyed so murye. 7 

1 I put myself into clothes. 2 Shepherd. 

3 And. 4 Wonder. 5 "Weary. 6 Broad. 

7 It sounded so pleasant. 



10. Commencement of the Seventh Chapter of Sir John 
MandeviVs Travels, entitled " Of the Pilgrimages in 
Jerusalem, and of the Holy Places thereaboute," 
from the Cotton MS. Titus, C. xvi., which is believed 
to have been written about the year 1400: — about 
1370* 

After for to speke of Jerusalem the holy cytee, yee 
schull undirstonde that it stont full faire betwene hilles, 
and there be no ryveres ne welles, but watar cometh by 

* This text was first published in a contribution to the " Pictorial 
History of England " by Sir Henry Ellis. 



128 ILLUSTEATIYE SPECIMENS. 

condyte from Ebron. And yee schulle understonde that 
Jerusalem of olde tyme, unto the tyme of Melchisedech, 
was cleped Jebus ; and after it was clept Salem, unto the 
tyme of Kyng David, that put these two names to gider, 
and cleped it Jerosolomye. And after that men cleped 
it Jerusalem, and so it is cleped yit. And aboute Jeru- 
salem is the kyngdom of Surrye {Syria). And there 
besyde is the lond of Palestyne. And besyde it is Asco- 
lon. And besyde that is the lond of Maritanie. But 
Jerusalem is in the lond of Judee ; and it is clept Jude 
for that Judas Machabeus was kyng of that contree. 
And it marcheth estward to the kyngdom of Araby ; on 
the south syde to the lond of Egipt ; and on the west 
syde to the Grete See. On the north syde toward the 
kyngdom of Surrye, and to the see of Cypre. 



11. Beginning of the 16th Chapter of St Luke, from the 
Earlier of the two Versions ascribed to Wycliffe and 
his followers : — about 1380.* 

Eorsothe he seide also to his disciplis, Ther was sum 
riche man, that hadde a fermour, ether a baily ; and this 
was defamyd anentis him, as he hadde wastid his goodis. 
And he clepide him, and seide to him, What heere I this 
thing of thee ? yeld resoun of thi ferme, for now thou 
schalt not mowe holde thi ferme. Forsoth the fermour 
seide with ynne him silf, What schal I« do, for my lord 

* According to the text published in " The Holy Bible . . . made 
from the Latin Vulgate, by John Wycliffe and his followers : Edited 
by the Eev. Josiah Forshall and Sir Frederic Madden, K.H." 4 vols. 
4to. Oxford, 1850. 



ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 129 

takith awey fro me the ferme ? I may not delve, I am 
aschamyd to begge. I woot what I schal do, that, whanne 
I schal be removyd fro the ferme, thei receyve me in to 
her housis. And, alle the dettours of the lord clepid to 
gidere, he seide to the firste, Hou moche owist thou to 
my lord ? And he seide to him, An hundrid barelis of 
oyle. And he seide to him, Taak thin obligacioun, and 
sitte soon, and wryt fyffci. Aftirward he seide to another, 
Sothli hou moche owist thou ? Which seide, An hundrid 
mesuris of whete. And he seide to him, Tak thi lettris, 
and wryt foure score. And the lord preiside the fermour 
of wickidnesse, for he hadde don prudently ; for the sones 
of this world ben more prudent in her generacioun than 
the sones of light. And I seie to you, make to you 
frendes of the richesse of wickidnesse, that, whan ye 
shulen fayle, thei receyve you in to everlastynge taber- 
naclis. 



12. From Trevisa's Translation of Sigden's JPolychronl- 
con, Book I. chap. lix. : as printed by Tyrwhitt in 
his edition of Chaucer's Canterbury's Tales, from MS. 
Karl. 1900 :— 1385. 

This apayringe {disparaging) of the birthe tonge is 
by cause of tweye thinges : oon is for children in scole, 
agenes the usage and maner of alle other naciouns, beth 
compelled for to leve her owne langage, and for to con- 
strewe her lessouns and her thingis a Frensche, and 
haveth siththe that the Normans come first into England. 
Also gentil mennes children beth ytaught for to speke 
Frensche from the tyme that thei beth rokked in her 



130 ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 

cradel, and kunneth speke and playe with a childes 
brooche. And uplondish men wol likne hem self to 
gentil men, and fondeth with grete bisynesse for to speke 
Erensche, for to be the more ytold of. — (Tee vis a.) This 
maner was myche yused to fore the first moreyn {mur- 
rain, plague), and is siththe som del ychaungide. For 
John Cornwaile, a maistre of grammer, chaungide the 
lore in grammer scole and construction of Erensch into 
Englisch, and Richard Pencriche lerned that maner tech- 
ing of him, and other men of Pencriche. So that now, the 
yere of our lord a thousand thre hundred foure score and 
fyve, of the secunde King Bychard after the Conquest 
nyne, in alle the gramer scoles of Englond children leveth 
Erensch, and construeth and lerneth an (in) Englisch, 
and haveth therby avauntage in oon side and desavaun- 
tage in another. Her avauntage is, that thei lerneth her 
gramer in lasse tyme than children were wont to do. 
Desavauntage is, that now children of gramer scole kun- 
neth no more Erensch that can her lifte (knows their left) 
heele. And that is harm for hem, and thei schul (an they 
shall) passe the see and travaile in strange londes, and in 
many other places also. Also gentel men haveth now 
mych ylefte for to teche her children Erensch. 



ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 131 



13. Beginning of the Beetle's Tale, from Chaucer's Can- 
terbury Tales, after the Text in Wright's Edition, 
1847 -.—about 1390. 

At Trompyngtoun, nat fer l fra Cantebrigge, 

Ther goth a brook, and over that a brigge, 

Upon the whiche brook tben stant a melle ; 2 

And this is verray sothe that I you telle. 

A meller was tber dwellyng many a day ; 

As eny pecok he was prowd and gay ; 

Pipen he coude, and fisshe, and nettys beete, 3 

And turne cuppes, wrastle wel, and scbeete ; 4 

Ay by his belt he bar a long panade, 5 

And 6 of a swerd ful trenchaunt was the blade ; 

A joly popper 7 bar he in his pouche ; 

Ther was no man for perel durst him touche ; 

A Scheffeld thwitel bar he in his hose ; 

Round was his face, and camois 8 was his nose ; 

As pyled 9 as an ape was his skulle ; 

He was a market-beter 10 at the fulle ; 

Ther durste no wight hand upon him legge, 11 

That he ne swar anon he schuld abegge. 12 

1 Not far. 2 stands a mill. * Mend. * Shoot. 

5 A kind of two-edged knife. 6 Should apparently be As 

' Dagger. * n at . 9 p ee l e d (bald). 

'° A swaggerer in the market ? u Lay. 12 Suffer for. 



k 2 



132 ILLTJSTEATITE SPECIMENS. 



14. From the Persones (Parson's) Tale, in Chaucer'* 
Canterbury Tales, according to Wright's Edition :• — 
about 1390. 

A philosopher upon a tyine, that wolde have bete his 
disciple for his grete trespas, for which he was gretly 
amoeved, and brought a yerde (rod) to scoure (score) the 
child ; and whan the child saugh the yerde, he sayde to 
his maister, "What thenke ye to do ? I wold bete the, 
quod the maister, for thi correccioun. Forsothe, quod 
the child, ye oughte first correcte youresilf, that han lost 
al your pacience for the gilt of a child. Forsothe, quod 
the maister al wepyng, thou saist soth ; have thou the 
yerde, my deere sone, and correcte me for myn impa- 
cience. 



15. From Lydgate's Poem entitled his Testament, ace Dr cl- 
ing to FLalliwelVs Text, 1840 : — about 1450. 

During the tyme of this sesoun Yer, 

I meene the sesoun of my yeerys greene, 

G-ynnyng fro childhood stretchith ! up so fer 

To the yeerys accountyd ful fifteen 3, 

W experience, as it was weel seene, 

The gerisshe sesoun straunge of condiciouns 

Dispoosyd to many unbridlyd passioun^ ; 

Voyd of resoun, yove to wilfulnesse, 

Fro ward to vertu, of thrift gafe litil Leede, 

Loth to lerne, lovid no besynesse 



ILLT7STEATIYE SPECIMENS. 133 

Sauf pley or merthe, straunge to spelle or reede, 
Folwyng al appetites longyng to childheede, 
Lihtly tournyng, wylde and seelde sad, 
Weepyng for nouhte and anoon afftir glad. 

Tor litil wroth to stryve with my felawe, 
As my passiouns did my bridil leede, 
Of the yeerde somtyme I stood in awe ; 
To be scooryd that was al my dreede ; — 
Loth toward scole, lost my tyme indeede, 
Lik a young colt that ran withowte brydil, 
Made my freendys ther good to spend in ydil. 

I hadde in custom to come to scole late, 
Nat for to lerne, but for a contenaunce ; 2 
"With my felawys reedy to debate, 
In jangle and jape 3 was set al my pleasaunce ; 
Wherof rebuked this was my chevisaunce, 4 
To forge a lesyng 5 and therupon to muse, 
Whan I trespasyd mysilven to excuse. 

To my bettre did no reverence, 

Of my sovereyns gaf no fors at al, 6 

Wex obstynat by inobedience, 

Ran into gardyns, applys ther I stal ; 

To gadre frutys sparyd hegg nor wal ; 

To plukke grapys in othir mennys vynes, 

Was moor reedy than for to seyn matynes. 

1 This is the reading in MS. Harl. 2255, /o?. 60. In MS. Earl. 
218, fol. 66, it is stretched. 

% Appearance. 3 Trick, jest. 4 Contrivance. s Lie. 

6 This line seems to be corrupted. Perhaps sovereyns should be 
sufferance. 



134 ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 



16. Conclusion of CaxtorCs English Translation of 
Higdeii's JPolychronicon : — 1482. 

And here I make an ende of this lytel werke as nygh 
as I can fynde after the forme of the werk to fore made 
by Ranulph monk of Chestre. And where as ther is 
fawte, I beseche them that shal rede it to correete it. 
For yf I coude have founden moo storyes I wold have 
sette in hit moo ; but the substaunce that I can fynde 
and knowe I have shortly sette hem in this book, to 
thentente that such thynges as have ben done syth the 
deth or ende of the sayd boke of Polycronycon shold be 
had in remembraunce and not putte in oblyvyon ne for- 
getynge ; prayenge all them that shall see this symple 
werke to par done me of my symple and rude wrytynge. 
Ended the second day of Juyll the xxii yere of the regne 
of Kynge Edward the Fourth, and of the Incarnacion of 
oure Lord a thousand four honderd foure score and 
tweyne. 

Eynysshed per Caxton. 



ILLTJ STEATITE SPECIMENS. 135 



17. A Letter written by Sir Thomas More to his Wife 
after the Burning of his Souse at Chelsea, from his 
" Works;' by Bastell, 1557 :— 1528. 

Maistres Alyce, In my most harty wise I recommend 
me to you ; and, whereas I am enfourmed by my son 
Heron \_Jerome~] of the losse of our barnes and of our 
neighbours also, with all the corn that was therein, albeit 
(saving Grod's pleasure) it is gret pitie of so much good 
corne lost, yet, sith it hath liked hym to sende us such a 
chaunce, we must and are bounden, not only to be con- 
tent, but also to be glad of his visitacion. He sente us 
all that we have loste ; and, sith he hath by such a chaunce 
taken it away againe, his pier sure be fulfilled. Let us 
never grudge ther at, but take it in good worth, and 
hartely thank him, as well for adversetie as for prosperitie. 
And peradventure we have more cause to thank him for 
our losse then for our winning ; for his wisdome better 
seeth what is good for ns then we do our selves. Ther- 
fore I pray you be of good chere, and take all the howsold 
with you to church, and there thanke Grod, both for that 
he hath given us, and for that he hath taken from us, and 
for that he hath left us, which, if it please hym, he can 
encrease when he will. And, if it please hym to leave us 
yet lesse, at his pleasure be it. 

I pray you to make some good ensearche what my 
poore neighbours have lost, and bid them take no thought 
therfore ; for, and I shold not leave myself a spone, there 
shal no pore neighbour of mine bere no losse by any 
chaunce happened in my house. I pray you be, with my 



136 ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 

cliildren and your household, merry in Grod. And devise 
some what with your frendes, what waye wer best to take 
for provision to be made for come for our household, and 
for sede thys yere comming, if ye thinke it good that we 
kepe the ground stil in our handes. And, whether ye 
think it good that we so shall do or not, yet I think it 
were not best sodenlye thus to leave it all up, and to put 
away our folk of our farme till we have somwhat advised 
us thereon. How beit, if we have more nowe then ye 
shall nede, and which can get them other maisters, ye 
may then discharge us of them. But I would not that 
any man were sodenly sent away he wote nere wether. . . 



18. Beginning of TyndaVs translation of the 16th Chapter 
of St Zuke,fro?n the second edition of his New Testa- 
ment (as reprinted in the '• English Hexapla" 1841) ; 
with the Variations, included within brackets, of the 
passage as given in his Treatise entitled" The Parable 
of the Wicked Mammon :" — 1534 and 1536. 

And he sayd also unto his disciples, Ther was a cer- 
tayne rych [certain riche] man, which [the whiche] had 
a stewarde [steward] that was acused [y l was accused] 
unto him that [hym y l ] he had wasted his goodes [goods]. 
And he called him, and sayd unto him, How is it that I 
heare [hear] thys of the ? Give a comptes [accomptes] 
of thy steward shippe [steward shypp], for thou mayste 
[maiest] be no longer [my] stewarde. The stewarde 
[steward] sayd with in [within] him selfe, What shall I 



ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 137 

do [shal I doo] ? for my master will [wil] take awaye 
[away] from me the stewarde shippe [my stewardshypp] . 
I cannot digge [dygge], and to begge I am a shamed 
[ashamed]. I woote [wot] what to do, that when [whan] 
I am put out of the stewardshippe [my stewardship], 
they may receave [receyve] me into their houses. Then 
called he all [al] his master's detters, and sayd [said] 
unto the fyrst [firste], How moche [muche] owest thou 
unto my master ? And he sayd [said], An hondred [an 
c] tonnes of oyle [oile]. And he sayd to [said unto] 
him, Take thy bill [byl], and syt donne [sit down] quick- 
ly, and wryte fiftie [write I.]. Then sayd he to another, 
What owest thou ? And he sayde [sayd], An hondred 
[an c.~\ quarters of wheate [wheat]. He sayd to him [said 
unto hym], Take thy bill [byl] and write foure scoore 
[tea:.]. And the lorde [lord] commended the unjust 
stewarde [steward], because he had done wysly [don 
wisely]. For the chyldren [children] of this worlde 
[thys world] are in their kynde wyser [kind wiser] then 
the chyldren [children] of lyght [light]. And 1 saye 
[say] also unto you, make you frendes [frindes] of the 
wiked Mammon, that, whan ye shall departe [shall have 
nede], they may receave [receyve] you into everlastinge 
[in everlasting] habitacions. 



138 ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 



19. Beginning of the 16th Chapter of St Luke, from the 
Version in what is called Cranmer's Bible (as re- 
printed in the " English Hexapla" 1841): — 1539. 

And he sayd also unto his discyples. Ther was a 
certayn ryche man, whych had a stewarde, and the same 
was accused unto hym, that he had wasted hys goodes. 
And he called hym, and sayd unto hym : How is it that 
I heare this of the ? G-eve accomptes of thy stewardshyp : 
For thou mayste be no longer stewarde. The stewarde 
sayde wythin hym selfe : what shall I do ? for my Master 
taketh awaye from me the stewardeshyppe. I can not 
dygge, and to begge I am ashamed. I wote what to do, 
that when I am put out of the stewardship, they may 
receive me into their houses. 

So whan he had called all hys masters detters together, 
he sayd unto the first : how moch owest thou unto my 
master ? And he sayd : an hondred tonnes of oyle. And 
he sayd unto hym : take thy byll, and syt doune quyckly 
and wryte fyftye. Then sayd he to another : how moch 
owest thou ? And he sayde : an hondred quarters of 
wheate. He sayd unto hym : Take thy byll, and wryte 
foure scoore. And the lorde commended the unjust 
stewarde, because he had done wysly. For the chyldren 
of thys worlde are in their nacyon, wyser then the chyldren 
of lyght. And I saye unto you : make you frendes of 
the unryghteous mammon, that when ye shal have nede, 
they may receave you into everlastynge habitacyons. 



ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 139 



20. Sonnet by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey ; — 
about 1545. 

The soote l season, that bud and bloom forth brings, 

With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale ; 
The nightingale with feathers new she sings ; 

The turtle to her make 2 hath told her tale ; 
Summer is come, for every spray now springs ; 

The hart hath hung his old head on the pale ; 
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings ; 

The fishes fleet with new-repaired scale ; 
The adder all her slough away she flings ; 

The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale ; 3 
The busy bee her honey now she mings ; 4 

Winter is worn that was the flowers bale ; 
And thus I see among these pleasant things 

Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs ! * 

1 Sweet. 2 Mate. 8 Small. 4 Mingles 

* The spelling is modernised in this specimen. 



1-10 ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 



(4. Modern English :— A.D. 1550—). 

21. Beginning of the 16th Chapter of St Luke, from the 
Version in the Geneva New Testament (as reprinted 
in the " English Hexapla" 1841) :— 1557. 

And he sayd also unto his disciples, There was a cer- 
tain riche man, which had a stewarde, and he was accused 
unto him, that he wasted his goodes. And he called 
hyni, and said unto him, How is it that I heare this of 
thee ? Qeve acountes of thy stewardeshyp : for thou 
mayst be no longer stewarde. The stewarde sayd within 
him self, What shal I do, for my master wyl take away 
from me the stewardshyp ? I can not dygge, and to begge 
I am ashamed. I wot what to do, that when I am put 
out of the stewardshyp they may receave me into their 
houses. 

Then called he all his masters detters, and sayd unto 
the fyrst, How muche owest thow unto my master ? And 
he sayd, An hundred mesures of oyle. and he sayed to 
him, Take thy obligation, and syt downe quickly, and wryte 
fyfty. Then sayed he to another, How muche owest 
thou ? and he sayd, An hundred mesures of wheat, then 
he sayd to him, Take thyne obligation, and wryte foure 
score. And the Lord commended the unjust stewarde, 
because he had done wysely. "Wnerfore the chyldren of 
this worlde are in their kynde wyser then the chyldren of 
light. And I say unto you, Make you friendes with the 
riches of iniquitie, that when ye shal departe, they may 
receave you into everlasting habitations. 



ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 141 



22. Commencement of SacTcvilW s Induction to the Third 
Part of" The Mirror for Magistrates : " — 1559. 

The wrathfull winter, proching l on apace, 
With blustering blasts had all ybarde the treen, 2 
And old Saturnus, with his frosty face, 
"With chilling cold had pearst the tender greene ; 
The mantles rent, wherein enwrapped beene 
The gladsom groves that now lay ouerthrowne, 
The tapets 3 torne and every bloine downe blowne. 

The soyle, that erst so seemly was to seene, 

AVaa all despoyled of her beauties hewe ; 

And soote-fresh flowers, wherewith the sommers 

queene 
Had clad the earth, now Boreas blasts downe blewe ; 
And small foules, flocking, in theyr song did rewe 
The winters wrath, wherewith e:h thing defaste 
In woefull wise bewayld the sommer past. 

1 Approaching. 2 Bared the trees. 3 Hangings, leaves. 



14-2 ILLU STEATITE SPECIMEN'S. 



23. From AscharrCs " Schoolmaster: " — about 1563. 

Quick wits commonly be apt to take, unapt to keep ; 
soon hot, and desirous of this and that ; as cold and 
soon weary [as soon cold and weary ? ] of the same again ; 
more quick to enter speedily than able to pierce far; 
even like over-sharp tools, whose edges be very soon 
turned. Such wits delight themselves in easy and pleasant 
studies, and never pass far forward in high and hard 
sciences. And therefore the quickest wits commonly 
may prove the best poets, but not the wisest orators ; 
ready of tongue to speak boldly, not deep of judgment 
either for good counsel or wise writing. Also for manners 
and life, quick wits commonly be in desire newfangled ; 
in purpose unconstant ; light to promise any thing ; ready 
to forget every thing, both benefit and injury ; and there- 
by neither fast to friend nor fearful to foe ; inquisitive of 
every trifle ; not secret in the greatest affairs ; bold with 
any person ; busy in every matter ; soothing such as be 
present; nipping any that is absent; of nature, also, 
always flattering their betters, envying their equals, de- 
spising their inferiors ; and, by quickness of wit, very 
quick and ready to like none so well as themselves.* 

* The spelling is modernised in this specimen. 



ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 143 



24. From Sir Philip Sidney's " Apologiefor Poetrie : " — 
about 1580. 

The Philosopher, therefore, and the Historian are they 
which would win the gole ; the one by precept, the other 
by example. But both, not having both, do both halte. 
For the Philosopher, setting downe with thorny argu- 
ment the bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so mistie 
to bee conceived, that one that hath no other guide but 
him shall wade in him till hee be olde before he shall finde 
sufficient cause to bee honest : for his knowledge standeth 
so upon the abstract and generall, that happie is that 
man who may understande him, and more happie that 
can applye what hee dooth understand. On the other 
side, the Historian, wanting the precept, is so tyed, not 
to what shoulde bee, but to what is, to the particuler 
truth of things, and not to the generall reason of things, 
that hys example draweth no necessary consequence, and 
therefore a lesse fruitful doctrine. 

Now dooth the peereless Poet performe both ; for, 
whatsoever the philosopher sayth should be doone, hee 
giveth a perfect picture of it in some one by whom hee 
presupposeth it was doone ; so as he coupleth the generall 
notion with the particuler example. A perfect picture, 
I say ; for he yeeldeth to the powers of the minde an 
image of that whereof the Philosopher bestoweth but a 
woordish description, which dooth neyther strike, pierce, 
nor possesse the sight of the soule so much as that other 
dooth. For as, in outward things, to a man that had 
never seene an elephant or a rinoceros, who should tell 



144 ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 

him most exquisitely all theyr shapes, cullour, bignesse, 
and particular markes, or, of a gorgeous pallace the archi- 
tecture, with declaring the full beauties might well make 
the hearer able to repeate, as it were, by rote all hee had 
heard, yet should never satisfie his inward conceit with 
being witnes to it selfe of a truly lively knowledge ; but 
the same man, as soone as hee might see those beasts 
well painted, or the house wel in modell, should straight- 
waies grow, without need of any discription, to a judiciall 
comprehending of them ; so no doubt the philosopher, 
with his learned definition, bee it of virtue, vices, matters 
of publick policie or privat government, replenisheth the 
memory with many infallible grounds of wisdom ; which, 
notwithstanding, lye darke before the imaginative and 
judging powre, if they bee not illuminated or figured 
foorth by the speaking picture of Poesie. 



25. Beginning of the 16th Chapter of St Luke, from the 
version in the Mheirns New Testament (as reprinted 
in the " English Heccapla ") .—1582. 

And he said also to his Disciples, There was a certaine 
riche man that had a bailife : and he was il reported of 
unto him, as he that had wasted his goods. And he 
called him, and said to him, "What heare I this of thee ? 
render account of thy bailiship : for now thou canst no 
more be bailife. And the bailife said within him self, 
"What shal I doe, because my lord taketh away from me 
the bailiship ? digge I am not able, to begge I am 
ashamed. I know what I wil doe, that when I shal be 
removed from the bailiship, they may receive -me into 



ILLUSTEATIVE SPECIMENS. 145 

their houses. Therfore calling together every one of his 
lords detters, he said to the first, How much doest thou 
owe my lord ? But he saith, An hundred pipes of oile. 
And he said to him, Take thy bil : and sit downe, quickly 
write fiftie. After that he said to an other, But thou, how 
much doest thou owe ? Who said, An hundreth quarters 
of wheat. He said to him, Take thy bil, and write 
eightie. And the lord praised the bailife of iniquitie, 
because he had done wisely : for the children of this 
world, are wiser then the children of light in their gener- 
ation. And I say to you, Make unto you frendes of the 
mammon of iniquitie : that when you faile, they may re- 
ceive you into the eternal tabernacles. 



26. The Beply of Belphoebe to Braggadocio, in the Third 
Canto of the Second Booh of Spenser's " Faerie 
Queene :" — about 1590. 

" Whoso in pompe of prowd estate," quoth she, 

" Does swim, and bathes himselfe in courtly blis, 

Does waste his daies in dark obscuritee, 

And in oblivion ever buried is : 

Where ease abownds yt's eath l to do amis : 

But who his limbs with labours, and his mynd 

Behaves 2 with cares, cannot so easy mis. 

Abroad in armes, at home in studious kynd, 

Who seekes with painfull toile shall Honor soonest fynd. 

" In woods, in waves, in warres she wonts to dwell, 
And wil be found with perill and with paine ; 



146 ILLUSTRATIVE SPECIMENS. 

Ne can the man that moulds in ydle cell 

Unto her happy mansion attaine ; 

Before her gate High God did Sweate ordaine 

And wakefull "Watches ever to abide : 

But easy is the way and passage plaine 

To Pleasures pallace : it may soone be spide, 

And day and night her dores to all stand open wide.' 

1 Easy. 2 Employs, occupies. 



27. Description of the Irish Mantle, from Spenser's 
" View of the State of Ireland :" — about 1595. 

It is a fit house for an out-law, a meet bed for a rebel, 
and an apt eloke for a thiefe. First, the out-law, being 
for his many crimes and villanyes banished from the 
townes and houses of honest men, and wandring in waste 
places, far from danger of law, maketh his mantle his 
house, and under it covereth himselfe from the wrath of 
heaven, from the offence of the earth, and from the sight 
of men. When it raineth it is his pent-house ; when it 
bloweth it is his tent ; when it freezeth it is his tabernacle. 
In summer he can wear it loose, in winter he can wrap 
it close ; at all times he can use it ; never heavy, never 
cumbersome. Likewise, for a rebell it is as serviceable. 
For in his warre that he maketh (if at least it deserves 
the name of warre), when he still flyeth from his foe, 
and lurketh in the thicke woods and straite passages, 
waiting for advantages, it is his bed, yea and almost his 
household stuff. For the wood is his house against all 
weathers, and his mantle is his couch to sleep in. Therein 



ILLTTSTBATIVE SPECIMENS. 147 

he wrappeth himself round, and coucheth himselfe strongly 
against the gnats, which in that country doe more annoy 
the naked rebels whilst they keepe the woods, and doe 
more sharply wound them, than all their enemies swords 
or spears, which can seldome come nigh them. Yea and 
oftentimes their mantle serveth them, when they are neere 
driven, being wrapped about their left arme, in stead of a 
target, for it is hard to cut thorough with a sword ; be- 
sides, it is light to beare, light to throw away ; and, being, 
as they commonly are, naked, it is to them all in all. 
Lastly, for a theife it is so handsome, as it may seem it 
was first invented for him ; for under it he may cleanly 
convey any fit pillage that commeth handsomly in his 
way, and when he goeth abroad in the night in free-boot- 
ing it is his best and surest friend ; for, lying, as they 
often do, two or three nights together abroad to watch 
for their booty, with that they can prettily shroud them- 
selves under a bush or a bank side till they may conveni- 
ently do their errand ; and when all is over he can in his 
mantle passe through any town or company, being close 
hooded over his head, as he nseth, from knowledge of any 
to whom he is indangered. . . . 



148 ILLTJSTRATIYE SPECIMENS. 



28. Beginning of the 16th Chapter of St Luke, from the 
Authorised Version (as given in the " English Mexa- 
pla") .—1611. 

And hee said also unto his disciples, There was a cer- 
taine rich man which had a Steward, and the same was 
accused unto him that he had wasted his goods. And he 
called him, and said unto him, How is it that I heare 
this of thee ? Grive an accompt of thy stewardship : for 
thou mayest bee no longer Steward. Then the Steward 
said within himselfe, What shall I doe, for my lord taketh 
away from mee the Stewardship ? I cannot digge, to 
begge I am ashamed. I am resolved what to doe, that 
when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive 
me into their houses. So hee called every one of his 
lords detters unto him, and said unto the first, How 
much owest thou unto my lord ? And hee said an hun- 
dred measures of oyle. And hee said unto him, Take thy 
bill, and sit downe quickly, and write fiftie. Then saide hee 
to another, And how much owest thou ? And hee said, 
An hundred measures of wheat. And hee saide unto him, 
Take thy bill, and write fourescore. And the lord com- 
mended the unjust Steward, because hee had done wisely : 
for the children of this world are in their generation 
wiser then the children of light. And I say unto you, 
Make to your selves friends of the mammon of unright- 
eousnesse, that when ye faile, they may receive you into 
everlasting habitations. 



JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS. 



